Archaeolog

We live, capriciously enmeshed in a world of things. In the process of human becoming, both artists and archaeologists, as skilled negotiators, mediators and translators of things, have opportunitiesto steward, provoke and subvert our intra-relationships in the shared ecologies of our world. Today, artists and archaeologists are turning towards each other to exchange experiences, narratives and revelations. This exhibition celebrates new and also longstanding relationships between art and archaeology through the practices and processes of contemporary artists.

Continuing the collaborative exhibition of contemporary art and archaeology established by the Rosc exhibitions in Ireland in the 1960s and 70s, Ábhar agus Meon turns towards the rich etymologies of the Irish language to present the challenge of negotiating, mediating and translating the relationships entwining humans and things. 'Ábhar' carries meanings of not only materials and matters but also subjects and themes, while 'meon' hints at mentality, ethos, spirit and temperament. Rather than merely asserting polarisations of mind and body, the theme Ábhar agus Meon suggests a multiplicity of intra-relationships between mutually indistinguishable conceptions of things and thoughts.

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Posted by Ian Russell at 11:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Greene Farm Archaeology Project (GFAP), in Warwick, Rhode Island, began in 2004 as a transdisciplinary and long-term project designed to facilitate research among a broad range of scholars and volunteers, using established and experimental archaeological methods. The central focus of the project is on researching 400 years of cultural and natural landscape transformations on one of the few remaining Providence Plantations (see project wiki http://proteus.brown.edu/greenefarm/Home).

Greene Farm landscape (2004).

In 2005, artist Lee Fearnside approached GFAP interested in filming a documentary called Telling Stories, focusing on how archaeologists create knowledge through discovering history. As archaeologists and historians having little knowledge or experience with filmmaking, we permitted Fearnside access to the project without considering how her work might affect our practices directly and indirectly. We were especially interested to see how Fearnside would translate and represent archaeology in her art, as she had no archaeological background except for having read Deetz’s In Small Things Forgotten. Over the course of two years, Fearnside filmed the field crew during excavations and in the laboratories. Though still a work in progress, I recently screened a rough cut of the film for the members of the Greene Farm field crew and gathered their response through a detailed survey and several discussions.

As an anthropologically trained archaeologist, I am particularly interested in examining the reception of the film by those whose work, voices, images, and interpretations appear in it. The field crew’s feedback and reactions are especially valuable in thinking about the many implications for relationships between artistic film/creative documentation and archaeology projects, and more importantly, the implications for how digital media affects archaeological practice. The following commentary focuses on an experiment stemming from the crews’ mixed reactions to the film. This is not an attempt to discuss the quality of the film (which is remarkable) or whether the filmmaker successfully captures the “creation of knowledge”. Instead, the purpose is to explore some of the questions and observations resulting from the intersection of the creative documentation and archaeological projects, as initially raised through the voices of the crew.

Continue reading "Creative Documentation and Archaeological Practice: Surveying Archaeologists on Film" »

Posted by Krysta Ryzewski at 5:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)