ANIMATE advances our understanding on how courtly theatre staged world-changing transformations – environments into resources and resources into commodities. In so doing, it probes new ways of investigating art history and early modern performative culture through the lens of mobility and ecological upheaval. The project enriches the composite puzzle offered by three types of studies and debates: investigations that have called attention to the non-straightforward ways early modern states across the Italian peninsula have projected themselves on the global stage of colonial commercial flows; inquiries on the mobility of resources and commodities, their agency, modes of consumption and making of consumer experiences; recent research exploring the foundations of environmental thinking, early modern approaches and conceptualization of nature, and current debates about climate change.
The international conference “Converting Natural Resources – Representations, Performances, Narratives”, held at UCLA on Dec. 1-2, 2023, co-organized with the project "Making Green Worlds", brought together scholars from a range of humanities disciplines and perspectives at the intersection of art history, ecocriticism and economic history to explore the complex relationships between resources, labour and consumers in the early modern world. By examining a wide range of textual, material and visual sources, the papers questioned their value and use in rethinking the demands and state of the humanities. The conference brought together graduate students, museum curators and academics, as well as residents and visitors to California.
The second international conference “Arguzia/Natura/Artificio. Baroque Contraptions and Ingenuity in Baroque Arts and Literature” organized as the culmination of ANIMATE dissemination activities by UNIBO at Palazzo Magnani, Bologna, on Dec. 5-6, 2024, brought together 13 scholars from different parts of the world at work on the 17th century. Papers brought to the fore visual and textual representations that mirrored or recreated natural environments and phenomena through immersive or deceptive experiences, as well as mechanisms and media – ranging from mechanical mountains and trees to musical interpretations and objects such as prisms and manuscript volumes – that showcased the intricate blend of craftsmanship and ingenuity defining the early modern engagement with nature and perception.
The research data and outputs stemming from ANIMATE will be useful to scholars and students in the humanities (visual and performative arts historians, science historians, philologists, anthropologists, environmental scholars, and gender scholars) and, as the outreach event has demonstrated, to non-academic public interested in the field.
