Spyros Papapetros: World Ornament - Adornment on a Global Scale

Architectural historian Spyros Papapetros’s lecture focuses on the theorization of bodily adornment by Emil Selenka, renowned evolutionist and anthropologist, and his wife, Lenore Selenka, a prominent feminist, pacifist, zoologist, and amateur anthropologist, who collected a large quantity of ethnographic material on bodily ornament and clothing during their travels to the German colonies of Southeast Asia. How do such histories of ornamental development interplay with evolutionist theories of “becoming and perishing” among animal species? And how are the global circulation of bodily adornments and the phenomenal expansion of their historiographies related to the immanent eclipse of ornamentation in modernist architectural practice?