At the intersection of art history, anthropology, and material studies, Echoes, Ripples, Wake: Casting Art and Flesh offers a critical reappraisal of plaster casts. Long dismissed as secondary objects—mere copies, tools, or pedagogical aids—casts are approached here as polymorphous, polysemic artefacts whose meanings shift across time, space, and context. Through a wide range of international case studies, from the Renaissance to the digital age, the volume interrogates replication, authenticity, canon formation, and the circulation of forms and images.
Contributors examine casts made from artworks, architecture, and human bodies, revealing them as sites of contact between art and science, memory and violence, creation and appropriation. Particular attention is paid to colonial and racialized casting practices, as well as to the afterlives of casts in museums, archives, and contemporary restitution debates. Conceiving casts as a series of echoes and ripples radiating from an initial act of contact, the book proposes a renewed theoretical framework for understanding casts not as subordinate to originals, but as generative objects that actively shape knowledge, heritage, and cultural imaginaries.