EDHEA – The Valais School of Art, HES-SO (Switzerland)
IPT – Instituto Politécnico de Tomar (Portugal)


Duration: October 13, 2021 – January 12, 2022
Semester: 1st semester 2021 ECTS: according to the institution's criteria (for students)
Language: English
Format: 5 sessions, 3 hours (3 x 45 min), Wednesday afternoons from 1:45 pm to 4:00 pm (Portuguese time)
Platform: zoom
Admission: open call
Participants: up to 25 students (according to their course curriculum); Professors and researchers (according to the institution's continuous learning precepts)
Attendance policy: absence of 10% of all seminars is tolerated.

Paper registers, folds, supports, dissolves, indexes. Preserves writing and blanks, conceptual instructions, identity information, registration cards, administrative records and news. It is also a composite of cropped images and surfaces and can be folded to create mock-ups. The post-industrial remains of the paper mills have re-emerged in recent artistic and decolonial debates; affect reflections on the future of books and reading.

The cross-disciplinary seminar PAPER TRAILS inaugurates the homonymous project of the IPT – Polytechnic Institute of Tomar/ Center for Technology, Restoration and Art Enhancement (TECHN&ART) (Portugal) and EDHEA – Valais School of Arts (Switzerland) financed by the FCT with the reference UIDB/05488/2020. Open to professors, researchers and students from both institutions, the seminar brings together knowledge and ongoing research on paper topics in its broadest and most material sense.

The seminar consists of four presentations related to the cultural history of paper in its administrative support function; related to the history of books and artistic practices; as a document and support for conceptual partitions and archives from dance to design and with the material dimension – chemical, conservation – of paper. The seminars will be followed by a Q&A session and accompanied by bibliographic references.
The last session, to take place on January 12, 2022, will be dedicated to discussions on the work proposed by the participants in response to the course topics. The session of articles/works proposed by the participants will be considered by the selection committee for the Symposium that will take place in Tomar in May 2022.

Students will be awarded the appropriate ECTS credits after confirming their presence, attendance and completion of the proposed task. Faculty members and researchers who wish to attend seminars as part of Lifelong Assessment are excused from carrying out the task and will be issued a certificate of attendance at the end of the course.

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Seminar 1,
October 13, 2021
Dagmar Riedel, Limited Storage

Dagmar Riedel is a historian whose work focuses on the Middle East, examining the relationship between religious beliefs and social attitudes towards the production of knowledge, in order to advance our understanding of how knowledge is generated, transmitted and how it changes over time. The most general aim of her research is to challenge essentialist assumptions about intellectual stagnation and the decline of Islamic civilization after the Mongol conquests. She is currently working on a monograph on the emergence of devotional literature in post-classical Islam, drawing on the exceptionally rich handwritten tradition of Kitab al-shifa? bi-ta?rif huquq al-Mu??afa by the 12th century North African jurist al-Qa?i ?Iya?.

Dr. Riedel holds a Magister Artium in Islamic Studies and German Studies (University of Hamburg) and a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures (University of Indiana). Between 2007 and 2019 she was a research associate at the Centre for Iranian Studies at Columbia University (New York), where she was part of the editorial team of Ehsan Yarshater of the Encyclopædia Iranica. Her thesis In search of the Islamic episteme: The status of historical information in Middle Eastern medieval anthological writing received the Foundation for Iranian Studies annual doctoral thesis award. She has held fellowships from the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin and from the Union Theological Seminary in New York. Between 2017 and 2019 she was awarded a Marie Curie scholarship at the Spanish National Council for Research in Madrid.

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Seminar 2,
November 3, 2021
Leonor Loureiro, The Paper World and the Paper Conservator

Leonor Loureiro is a paper curator specializing in 2D and 3D paper objects / Paper art whose recent research focuses on the drawings and caricatures of the Portuguese sculptor Delfim Maya. She was Assistant Professor at the IPT and coordinator of the paper conservation laboratory between 2008 and 2019. She has experienced the vast world of paper conservation and the need for the conservator to perform a variety of tasks and always seek knowledge and skills.

and

Maria José Ferreira Santos, A Brief Approach to the History of Paper in Portugal

Maria José Ferreira Santos has a degree in History, a postgraduate degree in Museology and a Masters in Modern History from the University of Porto. Researcher in the History of   Researcher in the History of Paper and Watermarks, she was responsible for the museological programme of the first museum dedicated to paper in Portugal (Paços de Brandão), inaugurated in 2001, and its director until 2012. Currently, she is still involved in this project as a scientific consultant. In 1997 she published the book A Indústria do Papel in Paços de Brandão and Terras de Santa Maria and in 2015 the book Marcas de Água século XIV e XIX.

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Seminar 3,
November 24, 2021
Sarah Burkhalter, Dancing on paper

Sarah Burkhalter, PhD, is director of the Antenne romande at the Swiss Institute for the History of Art (SIK-ISEA) in Lausanne and is a member of the executive committee of the SIK-ISEA. Her research focuses on the meeting points between dance and the visual arts, on partitions and choreography as conceptual design, an aspect she has been exploring together with Laurence Schmidlin in her book Spacescapes. Dance & Drawing since 1962 (2017).

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Seminar 4,
December 15, 2021
Uriel Orlow,

Uriel Orlow is a Swiss artist who lives and works in London and Zurich.   He studied Fine Arts at the Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design and at the Slade School of Art in London and Philosophy at the University of Genoa. He was awarded a prestigious Swiss Art Prize in 2008 and 2009.

Owlow has exhibited extensively in Britain, Switzerland and internationally, including with solo projects at Laure Genillard in London (2010), Les Complices in Zurich (2009), Habres & partner in Vienna (2009), the Jewish Museum in New York (2008-9), Blancpain Art Contemporain in Genoa (2008-9) and at Argos Brussels (2008).

More recent collaborative exhibitions include Calling all the Stations at the National Gallery of Kosovo, Hollywood Wonderland at the Seventeen Gallery in London, the Jerwood Design Prize in London, the Third Guangzhou Triennial at the Guangdong Museum of Art, Retracing Territories, Fri-Art, Fribourg, Hidden Traces at the Felix Nussbaum Museum in Osnabrück and Around the World in 80 days at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London.

Orlow's films have been screened at the Tate Modern in London, the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival Tank tv, the Whitechapel Gallery in London, the Locarno Film Festival, the Videonale Kunstmuseum Bonn, BFI London, the BBC Big Screen in Manchester, Arnolfini Bristol and at the Biennial of the Moving Image of Genoa.


Seminar 5,
January 12, 2022
Comments about the papers submitted by students


It is recommended that participants have at least level B2 of English in order to facilitate interaction and the completion of the intended task.

The zoom link will later be shared with all participants.

Link for registration:   https://forms.gle/f5Vg6mFg6hYBF3t87