Melted, Singed, Incinerated, Saved: Traumatic Materialities of the Great Fire of London

我的项目通过研究1666年伦敦大火的物质文化来探索人类对物理灾难的体验。尽管这场大火在城市和国家的叙事中占据了突出的地位，但这一事件，特别是幸存下来的废墟，在二级历史文献中仍然没有得到充分的研究，在传统的艺术史实践中被忽视了。烧毁、破碎和扭曲得面目全非，火灾影响的物体对价值、美学重要性、时间性和非人类行为者在人文科学中的作用的假设构成了重大挑战。在物理灾难时期，当物体的外观、功能甚至存在发生变化时，我们的分析方法也必须改变。这项研究采用跨学科的方法，将人类世和灾难研究的最新工作与艺术历史视觉分析和美学仔细地结合在一起，询问当我们将焦点转移到火上时会发生什么，因为火不仅是一种破坏性的力量，而且是一种生成的力量。通常以非人类行为者为中心的学科如何构建其“意图”，并剖析其创造的“艺术”？这个项目对艺术与自然、缺席与存在、物质转化与毁灭之间的边界提出了问题，重新定义了历史灾难与经历它们的社区之间的关系。

My project explores the human experience of physical catastrophe by examining the material culture of the 1666 Great Fire of London. Despite the Fire's prominence within city and national narratives, the event, and particularly the debris that survived it, remains understudied in secondary historical literature and overlooked in traditional art historical practice. Burnt, shattered, and warped beyond recognition, fire-affected objects pose a significant challenge to assumptions of value, aesthetic importance, temporality, and the agency of non-human actors within the humanities. In times of physical catastrophe, when the appearance, functionality and even existence of objects shifts, our methods of analysis must also change. Using an interdisciplinary approach that carefully blends together recent work in the Anthropocene and Disaster Studies with art historical visual analysis and aesthetics, this research asks what happens when we shift the lens of focus onto the Fire as not only a destructive force, but a generative one. How do disciplines that usually centre the human reckon with a non-human actor, construct its 'intentions' and dissect the 'art' it creates? Problematising the boundaries between art and nature, absence and presence, material transformation and ruin, this project proposes a redefinition of the relationship between historical catastrophes and the communities that experience them.