"If I had to do it again, I would start with culture": this statement often erroneously attributed to Jean Monnet suggests that in the absence of a shared culture, Europe as a political and economic construct remains nothing but a hollow shell. This conference aims to question the disillusioned position which holds that there is no meaningful common European culture, and to do so through images. One way to visualize the potential existence and limits of a European cultural base is indeed to trace the circulation of images – be they works of art, press images, posters, photographs, or even motifs and patterns – in the region, from antiquity through to the present day. What are the images that have circulated most widely in Europe? Are they specific to Europe or are they already globalized? What was their visual and symbolic impact? Is there a "visual culture" specific to Europe and, if so, what might be its distinctive "patterns"?

Argument

"If I had to do it again, I would start with culture": this statement often erroneously attributed to Jean Monnet suggests that in the absence of a shared culture, Europe as a political and economic construct remains nothing but a hollow shell. This conference aims to question the disillusioned position which holds that there is no meaningful common European culture, and to do so through images.

One way to visualize the potential existence and limits of a European cultural base is indeed to trace the circulation of images – be they works of art, press images, posters, photographs, or even motifs and patterns – in the region, from antiquity through to the present day. What are the images that have circulated most widely in Europe? Are they specific to Europe or are they already globalized? What was their visual and symbolic impact? Is there a "visual culture" specific to Europe and, if so, what might be its distinctive "patterns"? 

The symposium will take place on June 9 and 10, 2022 in Paris (France) at the Ecole normale supérieure, 45 rue d’Ulm. It is hosted by European Excellence Center Jean Monnet IMAGO (ENS), in collaboration with the project VISUAL CONTAGIONS at the University of Geneva (Switzerland). It is supported by the European agency Erasmus + and by the Swiss national Fund for research. It is also structured around three exhibitions running since Spring 2022:

• Contagions visuelles, an exhibition for the Espace de Création numérique du Jeu de Paume (10 May-31 December 2022 ; Curation : Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, in collaboration with Nicola Carboni).

• Those Images That Made Europe, a digital exhibition hosted by Europeana.eu (forthcoming June 2022)

• Correspondances, a “real” exhibition at the University of Geneva (16-30 May 2022) on the circulation of images, with works and texts by students from the chair in digital humanities at UNIGE (Prof. Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel) and the Atelier de Photographie at the Beaux-Arts de Paris led by Marie José Burki.

Organisation

• Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Professeure à l’université de Genève, chaire des humanités numériques 
• Léa Saint-Raymond, postdoctorante, ENS-PSL / IMAGOCentre d’excellence Jean Monnet IMAGO, ENS-PSL (https://www.imago.ens.fr), en partenariat avec le projet FNS VISUAL CONTAGIONS, Université de Genève (https://visualcontagions.unige.ch)

Programme

Thursday, 9 June 2022

Ecole normale supérieure, salle Dussane, 9h-17h

17h-19h : Amphithéâtre Jaurès

8:30-9:30 – Welcome. Coffee

• 09:30-09:45 - Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel (UNIGE) & Léa Saint-Raymond (ENS-PSL): introduction
• 09:45-10:45 – Keynote: Adeline Rispal. L’Étoffe de l’Europe®, une œuvre pour tisser l’avenir [The Fabric of Europe, a work to weave the future]

10:45-11:00 - Break

• 11:00-11:30 - Areti Adamopoulou (University of Ioannina), The pediment and the column: the persistency of values
• 11:30-12:00 - Fabienne Gallaire (INP), A Stable Continent. On the horse dans the other animal attributes of Europe in Early Modern allegories (16^th-18^th c.)
• 12:00-12:30 - Eveline Deneer (University of Utrecht), A light on Europe. The international and intermedial trajectory of a medieval chandelier at the turn of the 19^th century 

Lunch

• 14:00-14:30 - Sylvain-Karl Gosselet (CNRS, Université de Paris Cité, LARCA), Fashionable Europe: Iconological Wonders à la Bonnart
• 14:30-15:00 – Emilia Olechnowicz (Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences), Fabrication of Europe: Europe as the space and the myth in the Early modern costume books

15:00-15:15 – Coffee Pause

• 15:15-16:00 – Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel (UNIGE), What images made Europe in the era of illustrated print? The Imago/Visual contagions project
• 16:00-16:30 – Nicola Carboni (UNIGE). The rise of Machines: A Data-Driven Approach to the Study of Image Circulations
• 16:30-17:00 – Marie Barras (UNIGE). Visual hits from the past: tracing the global circulation of art images from 1890 until 1990

17:00-17:15 -  Break

• 17:30-18:15: Grégory Chatonsky (artist) – Réalisme contrefactuel : l'introduction des images possibles dans l'histoire de l'art [Counterfactual Realism: the introduction of possible images in art history]

18:30-20:00: Round table. Europe between its Vision and its Images / Vision et images de l’Europe 

• With Thomas Serrier (Université Lille III), Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel (UNIGE), Léa Saint-Raymond (ENS-PSL) and the team of the journal Le Grand Continent.    

19:30: Cocktail 

Friday, 10 June 2022

Salle des Résistants, 45 rue d’Ulm, Paris

9:00-10 :00 - Coffee

• 10:00-11:00 - Keynote: Prof. Christophe Charle (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne). The Cultural spaces of Europe in the XIXth century.

11:00-11:15 - Break

• 11:15-11:45 - Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen (Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art, Clark Art Institute), Posture and the Invention of European Art
• 11:45-12:15 - Léa Saint-Raymond (ENS-PSL) and Quentin Bernet (Ecole du Louvre), The “Madonna of Humility”, a pattern that made Europe (14^th-16^th c.)

12:15-13:45 - Lunch

13:45-14:00 - Coffee

• 14:00-14:30- Marie Blanc (Université Grenoble Alpes) , An image of Europe for and by its tourists during the Cold War: the example of Czechoslovakia
• 14:30-15:00 - Paolo Villa (University of Udine), War and Peace. The film « iconeme » of the urban square as mirror of Europe in translation (1944-1948)
• 15:00-15:30 - Lefteris Spyrou (Institute for Mediterranean Studies-FORTH), Promoting a shared European cultural heritage. The Council of Europe's Art Exhibitions in the 1950s

15:30-15:45 – Coffee 

• 15:45-16:15: Antje Kramer (Université Rennes 2), T 1956-9 by Hans Hartung, a line drawn between Europe and Africa?
• 16:15-16:45: Matteo Bertele (Ca’Foscari University of Venice), Defining European Art through international exhibitions (1955-1958)

Evening

Jeu de Paume Museum, Paris (Auditorium)

18:30-20:00 Presentation of the Exhibition “Visual Contagions” (Jeu de Paume, Espace de Création numérique). Discussion with the artists and curators, followed by a musical evening: DJ set, Tribute to lift compositions, by Truckthomas.

• With Marta Ponsa (Jeu de Paume), Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel & Nicola Carboni (UNIGE)
• And the artists Valentine Bernasconi, Robin Champenois, Nora Fatehi, Thomas Gauffroy-Naudin, Anim Jeon, Rui-Long Monico.

Link to the Exhibition: https://jeudepaume.org/evenement/contagions-visuelles 

20:00: Dinner for participants (Jeu de Paume)