Research master thesis | Arts and Culture (research) (MA)
open access
The societal role of museums has changed and is still constantly changing, the Museo de América in Madrid, Spain, is no exception. This research aims to capture the evolving role of museums by...Show moreThe societal role of museums has changed and is still constantly changing, the Museo de América in Madrid, Spain, is no exception. This research aims to capture the evolving role of museums by taking on the Museo de América as a case study. The Museo de América was chosen due to the limited international scholarly literature on the relationship museums in Spain, a once powerful and important colonial power, have with contemporary museological discourse. The research question is therefore, to what extent is the Museo de América able to create ‘contact zones’ and capture the changing narrative about indigenous communities in the Americas. This thesis uses Anthony Shelton’s methodology underlying critical museology as a set of tools as well as James Clifford’s concept of ‘museums as contact zones’. This research provides a better understanding of how an ethnographic museum in Spain addresses the colonial and authoritative practices in which museums were built on. The analysis of the Museo shows that some of the Museo’s underlying curatorial practices are consistent with Shelton’s methodological interdictions. However it also identifies a few limitations to the Museo’s capacity to navigate the challenges of bridging historical and cultural gaps across centuries. The most significant being the lack of an indigenous voice regarding the conquest itself. By including indigenous voices and presenting them as active participants, museums can play a critical role in providing visitors with the tools to better understand the evolution of modern society’s values.Show less
Research master thesis | Arts and Culture (research) (MA)
closed access
This thesis examines what insights the photography series Blue Sky Days (2012-) by Tomas Van Houtryve provides into concepts as vision, subjectivity and representation, which means that the series...Show moreThis thesis examines what insights the photography series Blue Sky Days (2012-) by Tomas Van Houtryve provides into concepts as vision, subjectivity and representation, which means that the series functions as a case study, a common thread. The drone as imaging technology challenges the traditional relation between image and vision. The remarkable visuality of the series, the vertical perspective, distorts our sense of spatial and temporal orientation. It differs from the visuality that long dominated our vision, the paradigm of the linear perspective. I argue that drone vision is a collaborative vision by a human-drone assemblage that should be understood as an embodied vision. Blue Sky Days problematizes the effect of the vertical perspective and the necropolitical logic to which it invites. In contemporary warfare, the digital drone image is no longer treated as a passive representation, but as an active entity, being part of a process. Blue Sky Days as a series of static photographic images emphasizes ambiguity and undecidibility, which contrasts the visuality of certainty employed by synthetic vision systems. Van Houtryve uses a strategy of anthropomorphism, a strategy that raises awareness for the fact that agency is distributed by human and nonhuman forces. His series humanizes the other, encourages empathy for the people living under the drone, which contrast the current of anthropophobia in synthetic imagery. In the last chapter, I discuss the series in relation to the debates around representation that troubled documentary photography, war photojournalism and art. Now hypermediacy and immediacy seem both a strategy by the military to create a civic weaponized eye, Van Houtryve’s drone photography is an interesting alternative gesture by emphasizing the process of remediation.Show less
Emperor Justinian (r.527 to 565) was one of the most famous and infamous emperors of Late Antiquity. One of his most remarkable qualities had been his legislative fervour. Early on, he had...Show moreEmperor Justinian (r.527 to 565) was one of the most famous and infamous emperors of Late Antiquity. One of his most remarkable qualities had been his legislative fervour. Early on, he had completed what would later be called the Corpus Iuris Civilis, incorporating the Codex, the Digesta and the Institutiones. However, in the wake of this Corpus, his reign produced another 155 ‘new laws’ that have not yet received the scholarly attention they deserve. This thesis has taken these Novellae seriously as a corpus of its own and has explored how we should understand this multitude of laws in their socio-political context and how these innovations were anchored in a sixth-century worldview. The Novellae performed a multi-layered balancing act between tradition and innovation, subject and emperor, and being shaped by and shaping society. However, these laws singled out one person whose presence invaded every corner of the text: the emperor. He was ruler of the eternal Roman Empire and Christian father of the people. In the end, he knew what was best.Show less
