Maribel Hidalgo Urbaneja

Mobile Subjects, Contrapuntal Modernisms (1900–1989) studies the movement of artists from the decolonizing world through colonial and artistic centres in London and Paris, challenging Eurocentric narratives of Modernism that have traditionally focused on the North Atlantic. Rather than treating histories of Asia, Africa, and Latin America as supplementary, the project examines how these multiple narratives intersect and reshape understandings of modern art. Drawing on critical archival studies, it analyses how colonial systems and power structures shape archival records and documentation practices.
The project uses an event-based database to connect artists through exhibitions, education, and training, while modelling identity through factors such as citizenship, gender, ethnicity, class, political affiliation, languages, and artistic networks. It also records techniques and media, and accommodates variations in names and languages across sources. As the database expands, the project requires additional archival data. Digital heritage and humanities research projects that attempt to address text processing tasks similar to ours propose the use Named Entity Recognition (NER) to process texts. However, applying NER in cultural heritage contexts is difficult due to the scarcity of high-quality annotated datasets and limited resources for training models capable of identifying entity types.