Paper records, folds, supports, melts, indexes; it preserves writing and blank spaces, conceptual instructions, identity information, filing cards, administrative records, today’s news; it is cut pages or surfaces, it is folded to create mock-ups. The post-industrial traces of paper mills re-emerge in recent artistic and decolonial debates; they affect reflections on the future of books and reading.

The transdisciplinary seminar Paper Trails inaugurates the eponymous research project of the IPT Instituto Politécnico de Tomar / Technology, Restoration and Arts Enhancement Center (TECHN&ART) (Portugal) and the EDHEA - The Valais School of Art (Switzerland). Open to teachers, researchers, and students from the two universities, the seminar brings together knowledge and ongoing research on and around paper, in its broadest and most material sense.

The seminar consists of four interventions related to the cultural history of paper as an administrative support; as related to the history of books and artistic practices; as a document and support for partitions and conceptual archives between dance and design; and the material dimension - chemical, conservation - of paper. The conferences will be followed by Q&A and accompanied by bibliographical references.

The last meeting will be dedicated to feedback on the works proposed by the participants in response to the themes of the course. A selection of the papers/works proposed by the participants will be considered by the selection committee for the conference planned in Tomar in May 2022.

Students will be awarded ECTS based on attendance and assignment submission. For the Professors and researchers who may which to attend the course on a Lifelong Learning perspective, an attendance certificate will be issued in January.

Dagmar Riedel is a Middle East historian who examines the relationship between religious beliefs and societal attitudes toward knowledge production in order to advance our understanding of how knowledge is generated, transmitted, and changed over time. The most general aim of her research is to challenge essentialist assumptions about intellectual stagnation and decline in the Islamic civilization after the Mongol conquest. She is currently working on a monograph about the emergence of devotional literature in post-classical Islam, drawing on the exceptionally rich manuscript tradition of the Kit?b al-shif?? bi-ta?r?f huq?q al-Mu??af? by the twelfth-century North African jurist al-Q??? ?Iy??.

Dr Riedel holds a Magister Artium in Islamwissenschaft and Germanistik (Universität Hamburg) and a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures (Indiana University). From 2007 until 2019 she was an Associate Research Scholar at the Center for Iranian Studies of Columbia University, where she belonged to Ehsan Yarshater’s editorial team of the Encyclopædia Iranica.

Her thesis about “Searching for the Islamic episteme: The Status of Historical Information in Medieval Middle-Eastern Anthological Writing” received the Annual PhD Dissertation Award of the Foundation for Iranian Studies. She held fellowships in the Chester Beatty Library Dublin and in Union Theological Seminary in New York City. From 2017 until 2019 she was a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the Spanish National Research Council in Madrid.

Leonor Loureiro’s intervention will focus on the diversity of paper objects that include drawings and mixed media, prints, paper boxes, embroidery on paper, fans and lampshades amongst others, bringing and discussing examples from paper conservation.

Leonor Loureiro is a Paper Conservator specialized in 2D and 3D paper objects / Art on Paper, whose current research is focused on the drawings and caricatures of the Portuguese sculptor DELFIM MAYA. As a former Assistant professor at the Polytechnic Institute of Tomar, Portugal, and Coordinator of IPT’s Paper Conservation Laboratory from 2008 until 2019, Leonor had to deal with the vast world of paper conservation and the need for a conservator to be multitasking and always pursuing knowledge and skills.

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

Maria José Ferreira Santos has a BA in History, a graduate diploma in Museology and na MA in Modern History all awarded by the University of Porto. She is a researcher of the history of paper and of watermarks. She was responsible for the museological programme of the first Paper Museum created in Portugal (Paços de Brandão), opened in 2001. She was the director of the said museum till 2012 and, presently, she is its scientific consultant. She published the books The paper industry in Paços de Brandão and in Terras de Santa Maria (1997) and Watermarks: 14th and 19th centuries (2015).

Sarah Burkhalter, PhD, is head of the Antenne romande of the Swiss Institute for Art History (SIK-ISEA) in Lausanne and member of the SIK-ISEA Executive Committee. Her research focuses on the common areas between dance and the visual arts, on partitions and choreography as conceptual design, an angle that she explored together with Laurence Schmidlin in the book Spacescapes. Dance & Drawing since 1962 (2017).

After studying photography in Chicago (Columbia College) and New York (ICP), Marcelline Delbecq (born 1977, lives and works in Paris) graduated from the Beaux-Arts school in Caen (France), then received a masters degree in curatorial studies from Université de Paris X-Nanterre. She was in residency at Pavillon in Palais de Tokyo in 2005 and was the French resident at Triangle in Brooklyn in 2007-2008. She has gradually moved away from photography to focus on the cinematic and photographic potential of writing through installations, films, readings and publications. She uses both narrative and narrator (the voice) to create an uncanny world where texts, turned into sound, generate mental images shifting from description to fiction, from past to present, documentary to fiction.

And

Leonor Loureiro, The Paper World and the Paper Conservator Leonor Loureiro’s intervention will focus on the diversity of paper objects that include drawings and mixed media, prints, paper boxes, embroidery on paper, fans and lampshades amongst others, bringing and discussing examples from paper conservation. Leonor Loureiro is a Paper Conservator specialized in 2D and 3D paper objects / Art on Paper, whose current research is focused on the drawings and caricatures of the Portuguese sculptor DELFIM MAYA. As a former Assistant professor at the Polytechnic Institute of Tomar, Portugal, and Coordinator of IPT’s Paper Conservation Laboratory from 2008 until 2019, Leonor had to deal with the vast world of paper conservation and the need for a conservator to be multitasking and always pursuing knowledge and skills.