On May 27-28 the AMBER team, together with the ERC project ECOART led by Prof. Anna Grasskamp at IFIKK, organized two days of reflections around artifacts and resources, with a focus on the early modern period. ECOART is a project based at UiO which investigates the ecological interconnections that shaped artistic practices from 1500 to 1800 by focusing on specific practices and materials. One of the case studies investigated in the ECOART project is the use of amber in the Qing court – an insight that led to Anna and Alessandro developing the initial idea for a joint workshop.
During the first day of the workshop, the organisers and the invited speakers visited the Kongsberg silver mines. There, we learned about the history of mining in Norway since the 16th Century, and how the development of this industry relied on the circulation of people and expertise within the European continent and beyond. A guided tour of the Kongsberg mining museum, kindly led by the local expert Dr Bjørn Ivar Berg, illuminated this history and its contemporary ramifications.
On the second day we convened at the Domus Bibliotheca for an intense day of discussion. Presentations included Tina Asmussen’s (Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum & Ruhr-Universität Bochum) work on mining in Saxony, Rachel King’s (The British Museum) research on amber’s global entanglement, and Zuzanna Sarnecka’s (Universität Bern) scholarship on ceramic glazes. We also learned about the three sub-projects within ECOART through presentations by Marie Ngiam, Yixin Xu, and Sarah Chen Huang, discussed by Elke Papelitzky (IKOS), Mariana Zegianini (University of London), and Alessandro. Lastly, a concluding roundtable featuring Christopher Heuer (University of Rochester), Rebecca Zorach (Northwestern University), and Mariana Zegianini completed the day.