After more than two years of a preparation that have been careful and laborious, but slowed down and hindered several times by the difficulties that have arisen due to the global pandemic, this project finally gets underway. It intends to go back once more to questioning issues that already count important in-depth studies, like the transoceanic relations between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, but also has the ambition of wanting to integrate the results already obtained with new reflections and achievements, and above all with a different point of view. The idea, in fact, is not to propose an approach which is purely targeted to how European society had received and used the travel reports and products arrived from American lands, but to also to evaluate on the one hand the influences and consequences – cultural, technical, artistic and social – that the exchanges had had overseas on local populations, and on the other how items and symbols closely linked to the cultures of the American territories after being brought to Europe had been reinterpreted and deprived of their original meaning in the new environment in which they had been introduced to, thus also involving the sphere of memory and the Intangible Cultural Heritage.

If the common thread proposed is that of the activity of the Dutch West India Company, the project also aims to consider the whole vast cultural, diplomatic, artistic, scientific, anthropological and gastronomic panorama that the approach to such a topic necessarily brings with itself, and will therefore also evaluate the tangencies and interactions with travels and exchanges also made by other European states and kingdoms in the period considered.

Waiting for the second meeting which will focus more on the urban installations and the architectural and social aspects of the new settlements, and the third one which will concern travelers, travel impressions and cartography, a first opportunity for comparison will be dedicated to the material aspects, therefore to the objects that have been used and obtained in exchanges, explorations or raids, and to the engineering aspects, which concern the ships used to transport them. The workshop will be held in Paris and Salamanca and will be hosted by the Institut national d’histoire de l’art and the Centro de Estudios Brasileños of the Universidad de Salamanca.

In addition to those who have already been involved in the discussions and in the preparation of the preliminary phases of this project, scholars interested in any discipline that can offer points of contact with the proposed theme, from collecting to memory, from travel literature to material culture, from engineering to anthropology, are encouraged to send the proposal for a contribution.

Please submit an abstract for a 20 minutes unpublished contribution and a short bio by 30 September 2023, at the following address: maddalena.bellavitis@gmail.com, specifying in the object the title of the workshop you are applying for. Presentations will be in English, French, Spanish or Portuguese and will last a maximum of 20 minutes. The organizers, Maddalena Bellavitis and José Manuel Santos Pérez, director of the Centro de Estudios Brasileños of the Universidad de Salamanca, will notify the selected proposals by the second week of October 2023.