What the "Workshops of Nature" should represent in the Eighteenth century

What happens when we explore the link between working on site and working in workshops? In such a framework, it makes sense to bridge a various set of practices not restricted to science: a local site is the constantly evolving product of the practices, imaginations, and negotiations of the users (scholars, travelers, artists, inhabitants) of a given place. In any case, our idea is that it is the scholar’s task to relate the experience of a site en plein air to the atelier phase of knowledge production, by which nature can be recreated (painters), transformed (laboratories), classified (collectors) etc. Workshops and sites of natural interest are hybrid fields of material and knowledge production, places where materials are often transformed by means of knowledge and where knowledge is transformed by the materials involved in its development. Moreover, this continuous exchange is the means by which borderline scientific disciplines (for example the chemistry, mineralogy and geology of the second half of the 18th century) can be cultivated in a site that is not simply the theatre of these transformations but an active element of transformation too. This essay also aims to provide a review for the Italian public of studies about savoirs opératoires et lieux de savoirs. Our focus on “sites” of knowledge makes it easier to show how the production of material knowledge is represented; but it also allows us to assess how the material (re)production of knowledge in images, literature and collections is constructed and curated.