This is an online event. Register for the Zoom here:
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_VPYV9hSISeWUg8Cx6WCmsQ#/registration
The Incommensurability of Making:
Learning from long-term apprenticeship
in Santa Clara del Cobre
Speaker: Michele Feder-Nadoff, artist & anthropologist
Discussant: Dr Lydia Arantes, University of Graz
Abstract:
What is the incommensurability of making? How and under what circumstances can craft production be seen as a practice of care, a kind of love? And, how does this inversion of careful and caring labor become a method of hope? These questions emerged through my mentor-apprenticeship as an artist-anthropologist with the master coppersmith artisan, Maestro Jesús Pérez Ornelas (1926-2014) and his sons in Santa Clara del Cobre, Michoacán, Mexico. Reflecting upon this fieldwork, this talk will present the concept of incommensurability topologically winding through defining making as a continuum of art and craft; proposing artisan agency-ing, crafting care, labor and love; to how making becomes a method of hope. The incommensurability of making is a model of production that matters beyond measure to resist neoliberal global markets despite operating within these capitalist structures. Incommensurability challenges dominant concepts of value and confronts the positional problematics of interpretation and quantifications of labor and productivity.
Biographical note:
Michele Feder-Nadoff is an artist and anthropologist whose practice and research centers on the meaning of making. In addition to her art, she conducted longterm apprenticeship-based ethnography with master coppersmiths in Santa Clara del Cobre, Michoacán, México, initiated in 1997 and was founding-director of the arts and culture non-profit, Cuentos Foundation, 1998-2009, Fulbright Scholar, 2010-2011, and received a PhD from El Colegio de Michoacán, 2017. Her seminar-labs train researchers in multimodal and collaborative methods. Recent publications include editor of Performing Craft in Mexico: Artisans, Aesthetics and the Power of Translation, 2022 and An Anthropology of Making in Santa Clara del Cobre: Presence of Absence, 2024.
Lydia Maria Arantes is a musician and cultural anthropologist. She was a Visiting Researcher at UCL Anthropology, held Honorary Fellowships both at UCL and the University of Aberdeen and was recently appointed to the Austrian UNESCO expert committee on Intangible Cultural Heritage. A former Assistant Professor at the Department of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology at the University of Graz (2019-2024), she continues to teach at the very same department.
Currently she is leading a multimodal memory culture outreach project about the Burtscher family and their acts of resistance during the Nazi regime at the vorarlberg museum in Western Austria. Furthermore, she is a project member at the Centre for the Anthropology of Technics and Technodiversity (UCL). Her research and teaching interests include technical activities such as (textile) craft practices, material culture, sensory ethnography, ethno-psychoanalysis as well as ethnographic writing. As an avid maker and proponent of technical engagement, she argues in favour of technodiversity not only in everyday life but, more concretely, also in Higher Education pedagogy as a means of reconciling body and mind through tools.
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Artistry@Work is an online Seminar Series in the Anthropology of Artists & Artisans, running 2024–2025
Maison des Sciences de l’Homme–Université Clermont Auvergne, in collaboration with the Royal Anthropological Institute
Organisers: Dr Raphaël Blanchier & Professor Trevor Marchand
This seminar series in anthropology explores the situated practices of ‘artistry at work’ and, more broadly, the working lives and career trajectories of artists and artisans plying their trades in regions around the globe. The scope of the series also encompasses studies of occupations not conventionally categorised as “artistic” but that nevertheless foster creativity among (some) practitioners and even accommodate the development of “artist” identities.
Find all events in the series here: https://therai.org.uk/series/artistrywork/
