In focusing on the corporeal representations of children in the Museo degli Innocenti, we have found ourselves wanting to think differently about the vitality of the objects we encountered. A broad trans disciplinary arts-based process methodology offered access to deep thinking about the affective entanglements and emergent learning experiences within  the museum space. In this work we ask: What can students of museum studies and history learn from the performativity of crossing disciplinary thresholds and thinking with theory and matter? How might this approach help us to use the residual material culture of surrendered children to understand their life and times better? In this presentation we share our responses to visiting the museum exhibitions and collections at the Museo degli Innocenti in Florence, Italy.

This museum holds a  large collection of identity tokens, including Brevi, attached to the children on their admission to the Ospedale degli Innocenti as early as 1445 (Macelli et al., 2023).    The surviving objects offer an insight into the traditional perspectives of history such as poverty, gender, materiality, and welfare.  The curation of the Brevi and other tokens as corporeal representations of children and their mothers reveal a sense of loss and disconnection. Surrendered children at an equivalent foundling home in England, have been referred to as ‘figures under erasure: figures who were rendered “blank” in order to be made part of a collective national story’. (Bourne Taylor, 2001, 297). We support a different story of the foundlings and the tokens and see opportunities for new narratives of historical practice, reflection and engagement that re-embodies, and re-configures these children in history. We can do this through the practice of empathetic encounter, affective engagement and the ontologies of relationality (Murris, 2021).

In this presentation we explore the performative nature of arts-based work by examining the affective assemblage of Brevi within the collections of the Museo degli Innocenti. Brevi are protective gifts with, herbs, objects or prayers hidden inside. (Anderson, 2007) As a means for thinking through matter, theory, and history we deploy a researcher/visitor/maker method. In this presentation we will share this journey but will also invite attendees to partake in the making of Brevi to engage in the historic assemblage.

By exploring these post-qualitative research practices, it is possible also to recognise the expansive and dynamic nature of the history discipline, the role of the historian and the way in which the past and the present are intimately linked in embodied historical experiences. In the history of history education, this is a new direction (Nye & Clark, 2023).

This work does not sit in traditional museum visitor research, it is a process methodology with a focus on using encounters as a means of thinking with theory, history and matter. There are no surveys or questionnaires seeking to gauge visitor impressions, nor do we track the numbers or time spent in different exhibitions. Rather we problematise the researcher/ visitor/maker experience and consider the forms of representation and affect within each encounter with the museum assemblages. An encounter and associated affective flows are not always immediately clear rather, as Jackson and Mazzei suggest we “sense the relations of intensities that signal encounters, motions and flows” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2023, 5). Thinking through these experiences allows for reflection on theory, bodies, history and matter. We see encounters as pivotal threshold moments or experiences in the research journey. We pick up from Jackson and Mazzei who suggest that encounters change us and we are transformed. They wrote “an encounter is not a confrontation with a thing but a relation that is sensed, rather than understood.” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2023, 4). This blend of historian, educator, visitor and artist team allows for collaboration where we employ feminist and post qualitative approaches including walking, listening, talking, journalling, drawing and making. This work sits comfortably alongside traditional historical inquiry, exploring the literature, including the multilayered and contested narratives that emerge over time. The visitor experience is journalled, objects sketched and photographed. The data that emerges from these is often rich and perfect for du-autoethnographic work. The data analysis is intentionally multilayered, including thematic analysis blended with talking, drawing, digital artwork, stitching, and writing. We draw on the tools used in poetry, memory work and critical reflection. This multilayered collaboration has led to extraordinary opportunities for thinking with theory, and for transgressing disciplinary borderlands. Like Strom et al we see the “material and discursive entanglements of body and conversation” (2018, 148) as enormously generative. Strom et al state “In this way, the affect we created collectively helped us forge new territory and new subjectivities” (2018, 148). The merging of researcher, visitor, and maker created a relational and embodied entanglement. The research process has revealed an opportunity for close noticing of historic detail, thinking with theory, talk, and memory. Plugging in to the vital matter and the affective entanglements our artwork evolved as process for becoming and doing research differently.

In our work we have spent considerable time thinking about the Brevi, and the tokens more broadly, as objects of identity, love and protection. The affective assemblage we construct is infused with memory, loss and connection. New empathetic stories become entangled in this assemblage, those of the keepers, curators and the observers in the museums. There are traces of those who cared for the children, wet nurses, nurses, inspectors who were tasked with the care of the children in extraordinarily difficult conditions. We know that regularly many more mothers presented at the home than places for children were available (Pugh, 2013,60). The Brevi are unique in this assemblage. With their hidden messages of care, never to be revealed, they possess an extraordinary capacity for agency. The Brevi were designed to stay with the receiver. “The finished product could be worn as a necklace, pinned to the body or stored in a pocket as a protective device to ward off either general misfortune or more specific threats”. (Anderson, 2007,58). Yet these Brevi never stayed close to the children. Instead, they were stored in offices alongside other identifying documents. We see opportunities for tapping into the significance of the idea of the Brevi and the practice of giving and keeping Brevi, for students of history and museum visitors. Arts based engagement with the Brevi assemblage and thinking with theory, leaves us changed and reconfigured. We recognise the duality or as Barad suggests ‘agential reality’ where matter, memory and meaning are fused (2007, 3). As we draw, write and stitch into our own assemblages we have been able to think about the contours and different directions arts based work can take historical inquiry and history education.

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