Drawing Together: Medieval Today (Working Title)
- Nina Hofkosh-Hulbert
- History of Art Department, School of Arts & Sciences
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Student Creative Production Grant
Drawing Together: Medieval Today is an interdisciplinary engagement with an unusual land surveying manuscript (c. 1405), seeking to bring a wider audience together with an understudied volume, collectively test the methods illustrated in the text, and craft a response in a new project. Along with technical instructions, at play in the Provençal surveying manual attributed to Bertran Boysset (Carpentras, Ms. 327) are multiple propositions: for the necessity of properly measuring and dividing the land as property within a larger cosmological scheme, for the authority of the surveyor to ascertain these divisions through skilled practice, and also for the myriad ways designated boundary lines might become changed or destabilized, challenging this imposed organization. Combining historical research with creative collaboration, this project reconsiders the kinds of lines being ‘drawn’ in this text and explores the resonances and dissonances of similar practice today. The project will consist of a series of participatory workshops, experimentally recreating instructions from Boysset’s manual in order to reevaluate these propositions, and will culminate in the creation of an illustrated volume documenting the collective response to the workshops and the manuscript.