No dia 13 de fevereiro, Francisco Martinez (Universidade de Murcia) será o orador do Seminário organizado pelo Grupo de Investigação Diversidades sobre o tema Gifts in the dark. Or, how far can we stretch an old Soviet library?

This seminar discusses a series of delayed presents in eastern Estonia. It problematises the traditional Maussian sense of what a gift is and does, since the presents under examination were given without any guarantee of reciprocation, following an excessively belated exchange, and without the presence of the giver. The research is based on the experience of curating three exhibitions, though I will mostly focus on one of them, Ex Libris (2024). This site-specific show took inspiration from the library left behind in the former School n.1 of Sillamäe (a former atomic town). In addition to stepping into unexplored territories of gift-giving, this article also reconsiders the intersections between art and anthropology, the potential—and limitations—of parasitical conditions for knowledge-making, the semiotic estrangement happening in wasted legacies, and the unfitting legacy of Soviet infrastructural projects.

Francisco Martínez is an anthropologist dealing with contemporary issues of material culture through ethnographic research. He was awarded with the Early Career Prize of the European Association of Social Anthropologists and works as a Ramón y Cajal Senior Research Fellow at the University of Murcia, Spain. Francisco has published several books, including The Future of Hiding (Cornell UP, 2025), Ethnographic Experiments with Artists, Designers and Boundary Objects (UCL Press, 2021); Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia (UCL Press, 2018); and Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough (Berghahn, 2019). Also, he has curated different exhibitions.

A partir das 11h, na Sala Maria de Sousa, no ICS-ULisboa.