Ana María Gómez López and Dorothea von Mücke
Ana María Gómez López, a 2023-24 Fellow and interdisciplinary artist, and Dorothea von Mücke, Gebhard Professor of German Language and Literature who taught in the spring 2024 in the Masters in History and Literature, developed a strong friendship at Reid Hall. Ana María was invited to speak to Dorothea’s class, and Dorothea was a frequent participant in the Institute’s activities. In this Library Chat, they continue their semester-long dialogue: Dorothea interviews Ana María about the essence of her practice, steeped in both archival research and scientific experimentation. Ana María describes why – and how – she uses her body as canvas, from the germination of a seed in her eye to the creation of a pearl in her mouth.
Ana María Gómez López is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator. Her practice centers on self-experimentation, definitions of biological life, legacies of utopian thought, and archival research in the history of science. Ana María was selected for a 2023 CIFO-Ars Electronica Award, to be exhibited at the Lentos Kunstmuseum. Her work has been shown at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Fonds d’art contemporain Genève, Rijksmuseum Boerhaave, V2_Lab for Unstable Media, Rencontres Internationales, and DOK Leipzig. She was a resident artist at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten and has held fellowships at the Osler Library for the History of Medicine, Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, International Institute for Social History, and Max Planck Institute for History of Science. Ana María was a 2015 recipient of the Premio Nacional de Artes (National Award in the Arts) in Colombia.
Dorothea E. von Mücke is the Gebhard Professor of German Language and Literature. Her research focuses on German and European literature and philosophy of the eighteenth- and nineteenth century, semiotics, aesthetics and the study of generic and formal innovation in the context of pedagogical reforms and the secularization of religious practices. Her book Virtue and the Veil of Illusion. Generic Innovation and the Pedagogical Project in Eighteenth-Century Literature (1991) studies the emergence of the bourgeois tragedy and the bildungsroman. Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century (1993) gathers an interdisciplinary group of scholars for a discussion of how reading and writing practices of the eighteenth century were closely intertwined with forms of inhabiting a gendered, mortal body. In The Seduction of the Occult and the Rise of the Fantastic Tale (2003) she provides a an analysis of German, French and American fantastic tales of the nineteenth century in light of the history of science and forensic psychology. As a co-editor of Harvard’s New History of German Literature (2004) she has contributed to re-conceptualizing the writing of literary history in view of the ever-changing role of language and the vernacular, models of the nation, history, cultural memory as well as media technological innovation. Her most recent book The Practices of the Enlightenment. Aesthetics, Authorship and the Public (2015) challenges the traditional understanding of the European Enlightenment by showing the strong influence of religious, especially pietistic, spiritual practices on key Enlightenment models of aesthetic experience, concepts of tolerance and forms of autobiographical writing.
