Project Overview
ESODIARC. A digital exoarchive: the reception of non-European cultures in ceramics Richard Ginori (1923-2000)
The project, a collaboration between the University for Foreigners of Siena and the Richard Ginori Archive Museum Foundation of Doccia, aims to create a digital archive of visual and textual sources focused on the reception of non-European cultures in the artistic, historical, social and economic heritage of the Ginori Museum.
The objective of the research is to select, digitize and annotate non-Western cultural sources read, translated or absorbed in the production and display of the Tuscan firm's ceramics.
The decades from 1923 to 2000 are examined, particularly that of Gio Ponti's directorship (1923-1933), with a special focus on the research of designer Giovanni Gariboldi–and the post-World War II period, in which Ponti's interest in these cultures is documented in the pages of the historical magazine “Domus,” which he founded in 1928, and of which the Museum's library preserves a collection.
Specific Objectives and Research Outputs
The study aims to create a first digital exo-archive, understood as a critical space capable of challenging the acquired knowledge about this extraordinary heritage, of defamiliarizing and overthrowing its traditional representations anchored in Western visual culture, recognizing the non-neutrality of the museum, a device of construction but also of forgetting memories.
The study falls within the framework of UniStraSi's project La Straniera | A Community of Digital Archives, which presents online in open access format documentary funds centered on the paradigms of reception of cultures perceived as foreign in the West for the purpose of a cross-disciplinary and transdisciplinary investigation of the readings of them with respect to European cultural canons.
The use of new methodologies in the field of computer learning and data science supports research in recognizing constants, lexical and visual, in the materials investigated, revealing the ideologies underlying different visual, critical and expositional readings of ‘otherness’, and its boundaries with respect to Western aesthetic canons.
The limits of computer science, which reduces cultural phenomena to numbers, are functional for this research to recognize and quantify the presence of constants and divergences in the interpretative and representational paradigms of the foreign, initiating fruitful processes of denunciation and deconstruction of the ideologized canons of European culture.