FOTEINI VLACHOU
(March 18th 1975—June 8th 2017)
"So, I am not sure what kind of post this is, if it is a literary one or what, but the photo to accompany it, naturally, was one of my most favorite paintings ever, from Mariano Fortuny, a late nineteenth-century Spanish painter – a painting whose poster I have framed in life-size format and which is hanging in my son’s room (framing posters, I used to look down to the activity as the worst kind of petty bourgeois habit, but there are few things that afford me greater pleasure than sitting across from it and staring at it for long intervals). I know that art historians can be insufferably pretentious, insisting that it’s not the same looking at reproductions, as opposed to the ‘real thing’ at a museum, but there are truly (relatively – OK, probably not true…) few things I would insist upon seeing in a gallery or a museum (one day, I’ll make a list). Fortuny’s paintings are one of those things, his brushwork is so lively, in a way that it deceives you into thinking that it’s actually swaying before your very eyes. And it’s so fortunate (pun intended) that the Prado finally, finally opened a sumptuous new wing dedicated to nineteenth-century Spanish painting, because there’s so much Greco, and Goya, and Zurbarán and Murillo a decent person can put up with, and one cannot imagine the treasures or the versatility of nineteenth-century Spanish painters (digression)."
I Know where I'm going by Foteini Vlachou
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BIO
Foteini Vlachou studied archaeology and art history, receiving her master’s and PhD from the University of Crete (2013). She has held fellowships from the Panagiotis and Effi Michelis Foundation (Athens), the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Lisbon), the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon), and a postdoctoral fellowship from the Instituto de História Contemporânea (Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa), for a project entitled ‘Art and Culture in the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America 1870-1914: Making/Unmaking National and Imperial Identities’.
She worked as a researcher (‘Crossing Borders’, 2014) and taught art history and non-western arts as a visiting assistant professor at the department of art history of the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa. She was coordinating the ‘Art in the Periphery’ research network, and published chapters and articles on Portuguese art, questions of historiography and reception, and the periphery. She was writing a book on Portuguese history painting, monarchy, and the empire, and co-editing a special issue on Portuguese historiography of art for The Journal of Art Historiography.
In 2016, Foteini Vlachou was offered an ICI Fellowship (Berlin), which she had to decline for health reasons. Her project was built on previous research regarding the construction of the periphery as a temporal rather than a spatial concept and the political ramifications of this phenomenon, seeking to expand on notions of temporality associated with the periphery.
Foteini Vlachou's work made a case for the return of the periphery to the center of scholarly concerns, not so much in response to an increasingly prominent interest in geography and the notion of place/space, but, on the contrary, as criticism of the postmodern obsession with cartography, mapping, and spatiality. As she contended in her thought-provoking article “Why Spatial? Time and the Periphery” (Visual Resources 32, no. 1–2 (2016): 9–24), it is to time, instead, that we should turn in order to understand the ideological implications of linear, homogeneous narratives where influence, progress, and development provide the seemingly neutral and universal accounts of culture and the production of art.
Foteini Vlachou studied archaeology and art history, receiving her master’s and PhD from the University of Crete (2013). She has held fellowships from the Panagiotis and Effi Michelis Foundation (Athens), the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Lisbon), the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon), and a postdoctoral fellowship from the Instituto de História Contemporânea (Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa), for a project entitled ‘Art and Culture in the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America 1870-1914: Making/Unmaking National and Imperial Identities’.
She worked as a researcher (‘Crossing Borders’, 2014) and taught art history and non-western arts as a visiting assistant professor at the department of art history of the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa. She was coordinating the ‘Art in the Periphery’ research network, and published chapters and articles on Portuguese art, questions of historiography and reception, and the periphery. She was writing a book on Portuguese history painting, monarchy, and the empire, and co-editing a special issue on Portuguese historiography of art for The Journal of Art Historiography.
In 2016, Foteini Vlachou was offered an ICI Fellowship (Berlin), which she had to decline for health reasons. Her project was built on previous research regarding the construction of the periphery as a temporal rather than a spatial concept and the political ramifications of this phenomenon, seeking to expand on notions of temporality associated with the periphery.
Foteini Vlachou's work made a case for the return of the periphery to the center of scholarly concerns, not so much in response to an increasingly prominent interest in geography and the notion of place/space, but, on the contrary, as criticism of the postmodern obsession with cartography, mapping, and spatiality. As she contended in her thought-provoking article “Why Spatial? Time and the Periphery” (Visual Resources 32, no. 1–2 (2016): 9–24), it is to time, instead, that we should turn in order to understand the ideological implications of linear, homogeneous narratives where influence, progress, and development provide the seemingly neutral and universal accounts of culture and the production of art.
[based on Foteini Vlachou's ICI webpage]
Image credits: Mariano Fortuny, The artists children in the japanese salon, 1874 (detail)
Website credits: Frederico Duarte, IHA/NOVA FCSH
Website credits: Frederico Duarte, IHA/NOVA FCSH