Making and Unmaking Value I & II | Department of History of Art and Architecture

Making and Unmaking Value

Making and Unmaking Value I (November 2025) & II (April 2026)

Organized within the collaborative project Metals, Minerals, and the Life Cycle

Making and Unmaking Value I (November 2025) & II (April 2026) explore how the concept of use—rather than intrinsic or origin-based value—can serve as a critical lens for rethinking materials and their histories. Moving beyond conventional frameworks grounded in provenance, extraction, and regional moral or financial economies, the Making and Unmaking Value symposia explore how materials, such as metals and minerals (including precious and semiprecious stones) accrue or lose value through changes in form, function, and meaning.

Metals and minerals offer particularly illuminating cases studies for historical reorientation due to their multifaceted trajectories of use across diverse cultures. Some societies perpetuated stable forms of these materials, while others embraced malleability, assigning value based on the materials’ capacity for endless reconfiguration. Examining the circumstances that lead to the assignment of a material to one of the binaries in this dichotomy allows us to better understand issues of permanence, utility, and worth, which have been negotiated in varying temporal and spatial contexts throughout history.

Making and Unmaking Value is structured in two parts, each addressing a distinct axis of transformation:

Symposium I (November 2025)

This symposium will engage with the ways in which the assessment of materials is affected by temporal transformations (imagined or real), encompassing cycles of use, reuse, repair, repurposing, and decay. It will explore how the significance of materials and objects is shaped by the labor invested, their durability or degradation, and the cultural meanings assigned to their persistence or obsolescence. From fossilization and preservation to processes of forgetting and fragmentation, this segment will investigate the role played by time in shaping societal values.

Making and Unmaking Value I—transformations through TIME examines the transformative journeys of metals and minerals from antiquity to the early modern period. The symposium invites speakers to consider time as a critical factor in determining value, exploring how the use of materials throughout history can enhance our understanding, enabling us to transcend extraction-focused narratives and recognize how value is perpetually constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed in practice—emphasizing the significance of form and function.

Through close examination of mines, materials, makers, and techniques, “Making and Unmaking Value I” highlights the central role of metals and minerals in knowledge cultures, in shaping political power, structuring environmental regimes, and enabling the geographic circulation of knowledge. Furthermore, it illuminates how the enduring ecological and epistemic consequences of material use can only be fully appreciated through a comprehensive engagement with their complex histories.

The symposium addresses several key themes, including a. the environmental cost of metals and minerals in both producing regions and consuming economies; b. metals, minerals, ritual geologies, and cosmological associations; c. the dynamic and adaptable nature of metals and minerals, whether they are physical objects or abstract concepts; d. the application of metals and minerals in medicinal and therapeutic practices.

Symposium II (April 2026)

This symposium will analyze how the valuation of materials shifts through spatial mobility (imagined or real), as objects and materials navigate diverse cultural, economic, and geographic landscapes. It examines what is deemed sacred or mundane, exotic or familiar, and valuable or neglected—and questions the criteria that determine these distinctions. This segment considers the adaptability—or lack thereof—of materials to new usages, interpretations, and systems of classification as they traverse geopolitical boundaries.

Making and Unmaking Value II—transformations through SPACE delves into how the movement of materials across regions reshapes their perceived value and function. Through examining the significance of place, speakers will explore how metals and minerals gain or lose meaning in new cultural or economic contexts. The symposium challenges the notion of fixed value and highlights how materials were reclassified, adapted or resisted integration across geographies.

By analyzing trade routes, crafting practices, local and long-distance exchanges, we explore how materials became seen as foreign, exotic, or ordinary, and how such categories shaped their use and valuation. We will also investigate how the classification of materials shifted—from sacred to utilitarian, or aesthetic to medicinal— as they crossed epistemic or environmental thresholds. The symposium ultimately wishes to emphasize that the value of materials was reworked through spatial entanglements that shaped historical imaginations, material hierarchies, and global asymmetries of power.

Making and Unmaking Value I & II center on the formability of materials, recognizing metals and minerals not merely as fixed-value entities but as active participants within cycles of use and reuse, embodying diverse functions from sculpture to currency, and from culinary utensil to medicinal compound. The two symposia raise critical questions about how value is not only made and unmade through use but also through acts of interpretation, classification, and judgment. These processes are deeply embedded in the epistemologies of different disciplines. The symposia invite participants to reflect on how these disciplinary lenses themselves shape our view of the past—what is recognized as significant, what is dismissed as marginal, and what remains illegible within certain methodological traditions. By juxtaposing objects, materials, and practices that have traveled through varied temporal and spatial contexts, Making and Unmaking Value offers a forum to reassess our own tools of assessment and broaden our conversation about the study of value and knowledge in the longue durée.