![]() Nevertheless reconstruction is the nearest we can get to an understanding of the multiple processes of embodied action and speculative work that can help explain the processes which eventually result in an object. Attempts to use reconstruction with the aim of achieving accuracy are completely utopian and I do not see it as the main point. However, understanding the creation process is very difficult unless one establishes a process of reconstruction and engages in an ‘embodied’, ‘hands-on’ way with the object. Of course, there are a whole number of conservation and material science tools that allow you to have a good understanding of the material composition of an artefact. In order to gain some insight into objects that seem to be particularly salient in terms of processes of trans-material connection one needs to understand at a deep level their materiality. I am working on processes of trans-material imitation that often involve an approximation to other artefacts not just at a surface level but at a deep, structural level. Some of the work that I am carrying out at the moment involves thinking about the deep structure of early modern objects. ![]() We know that people were responsive to the smell and the taste of earth and that certain products were particularly celebrated for the taste that they brought to the food that was cooked in them. It is also an area of material culture, especially in the case of early modern pottery, that might have stimulated the sense of taste. This haptic response, both tactile and kinetic, is something that I am very interested in. For example, we have fifteenth and sixteenth-century sources that talk about people’s engagement with intarsia and describe touching its surface while walking. They are designed for haptic engagement and are also meant to be perceived through movement. They are technologies that encourage an approach that involves vision, but goes well beyond that. They open new doors into questions of multi-sensorial engagement. Marta Ajmar: I became interested in these two areas of material culture because they are technologically and sensorially innovative and experimental, but in some ways have remained at the margins of historiographic debates. She is currently working on the monograph Material Mimesis: Local and Global Connections in the Arts of the Italian Renaissance, which explores the arts of the Italian Renaissance through a new lens, 'material mimesis', whereby one art engages in the cognitive imitation of another materially and technologically, bringing to light artisanal experimentation and knowledge exchange with both local and non-European arts. ![]() Her co-edited volumes include At Home in Renaissance Italy (V&A Publications, 2006) and Approaching the Italian Renaissance Interior: Sources, Methodologies, Debates(Blackwell, 2007). Her research lies principally in the material culture of Renaissance and early modern Italy and the Mediterranean world. ![]() In 2006, Marta Ajmar directed the research project for the major V&A exhibition The Domestic Interior in Italy, 1400–1600. She co-leads the five-year collaborative research project Encounters on the Shop Floor: Embodiment and the Knowledge of the Maker in which practitioners in the arts, performance, the humanities, science and social sciences, museum professionals and entrepreneurs engage together with questions of embodied knowledge and skill through participatory research and co-production. Dr Marta Ajmar is Deputy Director of the V&A Research Institute (VARI).
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