Organised by Anna Degler (Freie Universität Berlin/EXC 2020) and Katherine Harloe (School of Advanced Study, University of London), Research Area 2: "Travelling Matters".

This two-day workshop is held as a cooperation between the EXC 2020 project "The Travelling Torso" by Anna Degler (EXC 2020, Freie Universität Berlin) and Katherine Harloe (School of Advanced Study, University of London).
It is dedicated to the post-antique reception of one of the most canonised and well-known antique sculptures within 'Western' culture, the so-called Belvedere Torso, which is kept in the Vatican Museums in Rome. Since at least the early sixteenth century, this larger-than-life marble sculpture has been the centrepiece of a classical canon. It has also at the same time always only been known in its fragmentary state, as a powerful body in pieces.
Exploring scholarly, artistic and curatorial engagement with this centrepiece of classical Greco-Roman antiquity allows for a deeper insight into complex temporal, normative and political reference systems that are constitutive of classical receptions. The workshop will focus on the relation of body politics and classical sculpture over the five centuries since the Torso entered the European art historical canon in order to explore the entanglements of these engagements with ideals of freedom, humanity, and gender, as well as racial and ableist discourses.
Following the research agenda of EXC 2020, the Belvedere Torso reception serves as one paradigmatic case study of intermediary literary and artistic practices. In the workshop we will discuss how its reception within art, literature, scholarship and museums have produced or reproduced a variety of (political) temporalities and a set of norms. We will examine collection displays, the history of copies in plaster casts and other media, the Torso's material transformations and the many literary and artistic attempts at its completion, as well as comparing its reception with that of other famous antique sculptures (such as Laocoon, Venus of Milo).
Invited practitioner Stephe Harrop will engage with the Torso from the perspective of contemporary storytelling with a new piece, to be performed during the workshop.
This two-day workshop, held on split site between the Cluster Villa and the Abguss-Sammlung Antiker Plastik in Charlottenburg, will bring together international and local guest speakers working at the interface of a variety of disciplines (classics, literary studies, art history, archaeology and performance studies) to investigate and reflect upon the manifold temporalities and asynchronies that constitute and complicate processes of classical reception. Given the Belvedere Torso's central position in 'Western' canons up until today, the workshop aims at de- and possibly recentring the Torso by self-critically exploring classical reception and canonisation as a powerful practice. The workshop hereby raises the question how those practices actively shape temporal communities.

Programme

09:30 | Registration
09:45 | Katherine Harloe (London) / Anna Degler (Berlin, EXC 2020): Introduction
Chair: Anna Degler (Berlin)
10:15 | Elisabeth Décultot (Halle): Winckelmann’s Invention of the Belvedere Torso: Epistemological Foundations and Strategic Interests
11:15 | Coffee Break
Chair: Koenraad Vos (Cambridge)
11:30 | Anna Degler (Berlin): Modes of Thinking or Thinkers beyond Rodin. The Torso Belvedere in the United States (c. 1853-63) 
12:30 | Lunch at Clustervilla

14:30 | Check-in
15:00 | Lorenz Winkler-Horaček (Berlin): The Belvedere Torso in Berlin: Between Display, Distribution and Disappearance
16:00 | Short Break
16:15 | Stephe Harrop (Liverpool): Storytelling Performance Speaking Stone: Broken Stories from The Belvedere Torso
16:45 | Break / Time to visit the Collection
Chair: Kathryn Murphy (Oxford)
17:15 | Leonard Barkan (Princeton): If the Torso Belvedere Could Talk, What Would It Say?
18:30 | Reception

Chair: Katherine Harloe (London)
09:15 | In conversation with Stephe Harrop
10:00 | Allannah Karas (Miami): Black Artists & 'White' Sculptures: Reconfiguring the Classical Tradition
11:00 | Coffee Break
11:15 | Ryan Sweet (Swansea): Prosthesis Narratives: Constructing and Complicating Physical Wholeness in Victorian Literature and Culture
12:15 | Lunch at Clustervilla
13:30 – 14:30 | Closing Plenary Discussion

16:00 | Visit of The Allure of Rome. Maarten van Heemskerck Draws the City - exhibition at Kulturforum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
Guided tour by curator Christien Melzer (limited access for workshop speakers only)

18:00 | Dinner (workshop speakers only)