Embedding, Unfolding, Attaching. Mimesis of the Hybrid Object.

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Helga Lutz; Professor Dr. Bernhard Siegert
• Subject Area: Theatre and Media Studies ; Art History
• Term: from 2013 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 213948042

The applicants make use of the results of the first project phase concerning the emergence of excessive trompe-l'oeils and hybrid interlacings of image grounds and image objects in late medieval book painting and early Flemish still lifes to transduce the concept of excessive mimesis into the concept of a "mimesis of the hybrid object". To achieve this, the project draws on theories which developed within STS, ANT, Post-ANT and agential realism and which have in common that they question fixed ontologies and replace the distinction between active subjects and passive objects with the concept of hybrid collectives. However, in contrast to those theories the project is interested in the concrete forms of a mimesis, which represents by operations of embedding, coupling and attaching. The mimetic representation in these cases is not directed towards the production of fiction but towards the production of factishs (Latour), i.e. the creation of hybrid realities. Thus, by the use of the concept of the factish the project takes up an essential aspect of the modern's critique of mimesis (anti-fetishism) which had not yet been brought up in the first project phase and turns it into its opposite. The research agenda of the project schedules the examination of three object types, each of which accentuates a different aspect of hybrid objects: inlays, hinged media, and quasi-objects. The subject of early inlays brings a radical form of trompe-l'oeil into the foreground. In the case of the tarsie prospettiche the representation not only breaks through the border between imaginary and real space but is rather embedded completely into reality. Hinged media (e.g. diptychs, doors, transformation masks, Japanese screens) enact transitions between the spheres of the profane and the sacred, between representation and the represented, between "think acts" and "media acts". Thereby they enact zones of mixed realities. By studying quasi-objects like portable miniature reliquiaries or medaillons the project addresses finally the aspect of the mutual attachment of natural and political bodies by sacralized factishs. In this context the concept of attachement (as developed by Hennion) gains importance by which the attachment of subjects to objects and vice versa is designated. Quasi-objects are materialized chains of transmission, by which relics, images, and bodies possess each other.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 1867: History and Theory of Mimetic Practices