Call for Papers
Dead Matter and Animated Materials in Art
RACAR special issue to be published October 2027
Ex-votos, Museu Afrobrasil, Sāo Paulo. Photo: Sailko, Wikimedia Commons.
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Guest Editors:
Itay Sapir, UQAM
Joana Barreto, Université Lumière Lyon 2
Deadline for proposals: November 25, 2025
Deadline for final contributions: June 15, 2026
Since its emergence as a field of human activity, art has been the theatre of a complex dialectic concerning the perceived liveliness and lifelessness of artworks and materials. As Frank Fehrenbach’s Quasi Vivo: Lebendigkeit in der italienischen Kunst der Frühen Neuzeit (2021) has shown for the early modern period, the animation of lifeless matter was considered one of the principal exploits of artists from Giotto onwards, indeed sometimes the very novelty that distinguished Renaissance artworks from Medieval images, but the ambiguity of life and death remained constitutive of the perception of these objects all through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and later on. The specific and varied propensity for liveliness within different materials was explored in painting and even more so in sculpture, where, as Michael Cole and others have shown, the history of making—the carving of marble vs. the casting of metal, for instance—had an impact on the level and type of liveliness attributed to the finalized works. The original organic or inorganic nature of materials—wood and cochineal in contrast with lapis lazuli and bronze, to name but a few examples, in Europe and far beyond—added another layer to these distinctions.
In the case of religious subject matter, the theological ramifications of these issues cannot be exaggerated. In Christianity, the fact that images of saints or the Virgin came to life and could miraculously act depended, of course, on their divine status, but was also understood—in different degrees according to the precise historical moment of the images’ reception—in connection with their material properties, on the one hand, and the virtuosity of their maker’s craft, on the other. In other religious and spiritual traditions, not least Indigenous ones, the divine or ancestral liveliness of fabricated objects and the materials they are made of have also been understood in richly various ways.
In many cases, the issue of matter itself being dead or, on the contrary, artistically enlivened was complicated by pictorial or (less often) sculptural narratives that also played on the uncertain transition between life and death of living creatures, especially humans. The emergence around 1600—and spectacularly, in the work of Caravaggio—of an interest in the instant of death itself, in its ambivalences and temporal intricacies, questioned in parallel the material infrastructure of these depictions: how matter was both brought to life in the depiction of a person intended to be shown as alive and, at the same time, exploited in its literal inanimateness in order to hint at the loss of life occurring at the present moment of the image.
This special issue of RACAR, originally based on a series of panels at the CIHA congress in Lyon but wishing to broaden the sessions’ chronological and geographical scope, seeks to explore the complexities of life and death in the imaginaire associated with the different material components of artworks. We are specifically interested in including contributions about non-European and Indigenous cultures. This issue will also probe how the frequent depictions of life’s end, be it through violent death or in peaceful departure, interacted with the material choices (or constraints) of artists.
We are soliciting written (maximum 7,500 words, including notes) and creative contributions (maximum 10 images and 1,000 words, including notes). Articles will be submitted for peer review.
Proposals for contributions can be sent to Itay Sapir ([email protected]) and Joana Barreto ([email protected]) before November 1, 2025. They should include a title followed by an abstract (300 words max.), a short biography (100 words max.) and a 1 page CV. If proposing an account of practice, please include 2–5 images with your pitch.
Guest Editors:
Itay Sapir, UQAM
Joana Barreto, Université Lumière Lyon 2
Deadline for proposals: November 25, 2025
Deadline for final contributions: June 15, 2026
Since its emergence as a field of human activity, art has been the theatre of a complex dialectic concerning the perceived liveliness and lifelessness of artworks and materials. As Frank Fehrenbach’s Quasi Vivo: Lebendigkeit in der italienischen Kunst der Frühen Neuzeit (2021) has shown for the early modern period, the animation of lifeless matter was considered one of the principal exploits of artists from Giotto onwards, indeed sometimes the very novelty that distinguished Renaissance artworks from Medieval images, but the ambiguity of life and death remained constitutive of the perception of these objects all through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and later on. The specific and varied propensity for liveliness within different materials was explored in painting and even more so in sculpture, where, as Michael Cole and others have shown, the history of making—the carving of marble vs. the casting of metal, for instance—had an impact on the level and type of liveliness attributed to the finalized works. The original organic or inorganic nature of materials—wood and cochineal in contrast with lapis lazuli and bronze, to name but a few examples, in Europe and far beyond—added another layer to these distinctions.
In the case of religious subject matter, the theological ramifications of these issues cannot be exaggerated. In Christianity, the fact that images of saints or the Virgin came to life and could miraculously act depended, of course, on their divine status, but was also understood—in different degrees according to the precise historical moment of the images’ reception—in connection with their material properties, on the one hand, and the virtuosity of their maker’s craft, on the other. In other religious and spiritual traditions, not least Indigenous ones, the divine or ancestral liveliness of fabricated objects and the materials they are made of have also been understood in richly various ways.
In many cases, the issue of matter itself being dead or, on the contrary, artistically enlivened was complicated by pictorial or (less often) sculptural narratives that also played on the uncertain transition between life and death of living creatures, especially humans. The emergence around 1600—and spectacularly, in the work of Caravaggio—of an interest in the instant of death itself, in its ambivalences and temporal intricacies, questioned in parallel the material infrastructure of these depictions: how matter was both brought to life in the depiction of a person intended to be shown as alive and, at the same time, exploited in its literal inanimateness in order to hint at the loss of life occurring at the present moment of the image.
This special issue of RACAR, originally based on a series of panels at the CIHA congress in Lyon but wishing to broaden the sessions’ chronological and geographical scope, seeks to explore the complexities of life and death in the imaginaire associated with the different material components of artworks. We are specifically interested in including contributions about non-European and Indigenous cultures. This issue will also probe how the frequent depictions of life’s end, be it through violent death or in peaceful departure, interacted with the material choices (or constraints) of artists.
We are soliciting written (maximum 7,500 words, including notes) and creative contributions (maximum 10 images and 1,000 words, including notes). Articles will be submitted for peer review.
Proposals for contributions can be sent to Itay Sapir ([email protected]) and Joana Barreto ([email protected]) before November 1, 2025. They should include a title followed by an abstract (300 words max.), a short biography (100 words max.) and a 1 page CV. If proposing an account of practice, please include 2–5 images with your pitch.