Practicing Place Research Training Group

Across the globe, the year 2020 was unexpectedly marked by the CO- VID-19 pandemic. During the first wave of the virus, the media was floo- ded with photographs of empty public spaces – spaces that had once been the locations of historic events, celebrations, protests, social gatherings, crowds of tourists – stirring up bittersweet emotions. On the one hand, these pictures are intensely beautiful. They recall artist’s books and historical photographer’s monographs whose authors took pains to produce scenes devoid of people (indeed, this booklet features photographs from a 1968 monograph dedicated to Diocletian’s Palace by Nenad Gattin). On the other hand, they remind us how important human interaction is for any given place. Confronted with the experience of uncertainty, we asked ourselves – can visualisations of empty spaces focus our attention on the act of waiting, can we learn more about, and from, this phenomenon? We therefore decided to organize an international conference entitled Watching, Waiting – Empty Spaces and the Representation of Isolation. This conference was inspired by the Institute of Art History’s project Exposition [Ekspozicija]. Themes and Aspects of Croatian Photography from the 19th Century until Today, which is financed by the Croatian Science Foundation. It also represents the sixth annual Discovering Dalmatia conference, a programme offering a week of events in scholarship and research. The experience of working on a project that brings together the work of experts in the fields of art history, ethnology, medicine, architecture, and others highlights the importance of a range of diverse approaches to the theme of this conference. The enthusiastic response to this conference promises an interdisciplinary dialogue that will entirely fulfil the expectations that we had for it. Presentations dedicated to the history and theory of representing empty space through the media of photography, film, and other artistic practi- ces, as well as the topics of empty spaces, isolation, and loneliness from the perspective of different scholarly disciplines, have been organised into a three-day programme. Due to the current situation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, we have shifted our focus to the online conference. Participants in the Split City Museum’s and Cornaro Hotel’s conference rooms will be united with those seated in front of their computer screens by the Zoom platform. In addition to the conference, and as part of this year’s Discovering Dal- matia, an exhibition curated by Joško Belamarić will be launched at the Split City Museum, entitled Split and Diocletian’s Palace in the Work of Danish Painter Johan Peter Kornbeck. It will examine Kornbeck’s paintings, which enrich the iconography of Split in the middle of the late 19th century, and will highlight the interest Danish painters displayed for Split and Dalmatia in this period, which has been entirely overlooked until now. This year’s programme will conclude with an online book launch of Discovering Dalmatia: Dalmatia in Travelogues, Images, and Photographs (edited by Katrina O’Loughlin, Ana Šverko and Elke Katharina Wittich), which brings together articles that emerged from earlier Discovering Dalmatia conferences. This year’s conference will not itself suffer because of the distance, but to a certain extent that other, wonderful side of the conference – the one that only direct scholarly conversations provide – certainly will. We will try to make up for this by working on the post-conference publication, with the aim of continuing to publish conference proceedings from our annual interdisciplinary dialogues in Split. It is our hope that these proceedings will have an impact on the global art history, however small, enriching it with conferences and books that are the direct result of wonderful, warm and productive cultural connections. (from the Introduction)