Conference #2 on the Art of scribbling and doodling with Tim Ingold: “Inhabiting the page of scribble”

30 March 2022

Conference #2 of the cycle around the exhibition Scribbling and Doodling
Wednesday 30 March at 6.30 pm
Michel Piccoli Room, Villa Medici
Conference in English with simultaneous translation into Italian
Duration: 1 hour

Free event, limited number of seats. Advance booking required.
SOLD OUT

Please consider cancelling your Eventbrite booking if you no longer wish to attend so that we can offer the opportunity for others to attend the event.

This conference will not be recorded or filmed and will thus not be broadcast later.

Alongside the exhibition Scribbling and Doodling. From Leonardo da Vinci to Cy Twombly, presented until the 22nd May 2022, Villa Medici presents a series of six conferences held by several Art History, Philosophy and Anthropology scholars to share their interpretation of the practice of scribbling in relation to their field of research..

INHABITING THE PAGE OF SCRIBBLE

For this second conference of the cycle, Villa Medici presents a talk with Tim Ingold, Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen.

Is the scribble an offence to both writing and drawing? It offends readers because it is illegible, and viewers because it is unrecognizable.

Both accusations, however, rest on a particular understanding of the relation of the line to the surface, the origins of which accompanied the birth of the modern era with the twin inventions of print and perspective. With print, the text appears to float above the surface of the page, as if upon a blank sheet; with perspective, the world appears to lie behind it, as if seen through the transparent pane.

Thus, what we now denigrate as an anomalous hybrid, the scribble, was truly the ground of graphism from which writing and drawing were subsequently separated out, along the lines of a division between text and image.

Researcher and anthropologist Tim Ingold will discuss how to undo this separation, reconcile the lines, and fully re-inhabit the page.

SPEAKER

Tim Ingold

Tim Ingold, FBA, FRSE, is Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. He has carried out fieldwork among Saami and Finnish people in Lapland, and has written on environment, technology and social organisation in the circumpolar North, on animals in human society, and on human ecology and evolutionary theory. His recent books include The Perception of the Environment (2000), Lines (2007), Being Alive (2011), Making (2013), The Life of Lines (2015), Anthropology and/as Education (2018), Anthropology: Why it Matters (2018), Correspondences (2020) and Imagining For Real (2022).

NEXT CONFERENCES OF THE SCRIBBLING AND DOODLING CYCLE

Thursday 14 April 2022
Mauro Mussolin (architect and art historian, Professor at the Università di Chieti Pescara, ITA)
Conference in Italian

Thursday 21 April 2022
Vincent Debaene (historian of literature and anthropology, Professor at the University of Geneva, CH)
Conference in French

Thursday 5 May 2022 : CONFERENCE CANCELLED
Anne Montfort-Tanguy (curator at the Cabinet d’art graphique du Musée national d’art moderne – Centre Pompidou, Paris, FR)

Thursday 19 May 2022
Philippe-Alain Michaud (curator in charge of the film collection of the Musée national d’art moderne – Centre Pompidou, Paris, FR)
Conference in French

➝ Read more about the exhibition

PRACTICAL INFORMATION

To access the conferences, participants are kindly requested to present their valid Covid Pass and to wear a FFP2 mask during the whole conference.

This conference is not recorded or filmed and will therefore not be broadcast later.

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