Ireland from a Polish perspective: A Polish archaeologist's blog on life in Ireland
I just came across this blog, and I thought it might interest the project team (particularly Tadhg). It's titled '
Ireland from a Polish perspective', and it was started by
Krystian Kozerawski who came to Ireland as an archaeologist and ended up becoming a journalist for newly established Polish newspapers.
Although the blog isn't updated anymore, there are some interesting thoughts on Irish society and that Krystian is an archaeologist, there are some good cross-disciplinary thoughts that could be provocative for the project.
Labels: archaeology, sociology
The writing is on the wall: Graffiti Archaeology
[From: http://grafarc.org]
Graffiti Archaeology is a project devoted to the study of graffiti-covered walls as they change over time. The core of the project is a timelapse collage, made of photos of graffiti taken at the same location by many different photographers over a span of several years. The photos were taken in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and other cities, over a timespan from the late 1990's to the present.
Using the
grafarc explorer, you can visit some classic graffiti spots, see what they looked like in the past, and explore how they have changed over the years.
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For example - notice the palimpsestic changing of this wall over time.
Labels: archaeology, art, visual art
The Cardiff Arcades Project
Friends in Cardiff have for few months embarked on a place-making project.
The Arcades Project: A 3D Documentary explores the famed arcades of Cardiff. The city is known for having the highest concentration of Victorian and Edwardian arcades in the UK, hence its rebranding as the city of arcades (not just rugby folks).
The lead artist
Jennie Savage assisted by
Andrew Cochrane have developed a series of art events and responses to
Walter Benjamin's unfinished
Arcades Project on the the Parisian arcades. The events both interrogate the spaces from theoretical and aesthetic perspectives, but they also seek to engage with the communities of businesses, patrons and passersby who frequent the arcades, activating and enhancing the social percolations of urban architecture in inner city Cardiff.
The project features artist talks, peripatetic media (a la
Janet Cardiff) and a 3D mapping project. Savage's process focuses on response and interaction with others hoping to draw out the constellations of linkages and meanings shared by all those frequenting the arcades.
Labels: archaeology, architecture, art, material culture, performance, visual art
Archaeology of the contemporary
I came across the following excerpt from James Clifford's
The Predicament of Culture, reproduced in
Interpreting Objects and Collections, Susan Pearce (ed), Routledge (1994):
Clifford is writing about the way we value objects in collections and notes how we find "intrinsic interest and beauty in objects from a past time" and how we assume that "collecting everyday objects from ancient (preferably vanished) civilisations will be more rewarding than collecting, for example decorated thermoses from modern China or customised T-shirts from Oceania...Temporailty is reified and salvaged as origin, beauty and knowledge". (261-62)
This pretty elegantly sums up, I think, a central issue for the practice of archaeology in contemporary contexts. Of course, an interesting question is whether shifting the focus onto the contemporary for the purposes of collection can constitute merely another order of reficiation--the reification lying more in the system of collection than the things collected.
Labels: archaeology, theory
Dublin divided? Deep ecologies and social complexity
I was recently thinking about popular conceptions of Dublin urban geography. The most dominant one is probably the North:South divide. Quoted from a site found from a quick Google search for 'Dublin inner city culture' (
www.streetsofdublin.com):
"Traditionally, a north versus south division has existed in Dublin with the dividing line provided by the River Liffey. The Northside is generally seen as working-class, while the Southside is seen as middle and upper middle class. Dublin postal districts reflect the North/South divide, with odd numbers being used for districts on the Northside, e.g: Phibsboro is in Dublin 7, and even numbers for ones on the Southside, e.g: Sandymount is in Dublin 4." (
Read the rest of the page here)
The article does go on to give a deeper history for divisions and also discusses East:West issues. What I was thinking was, however, that I feel our project should make some direct statements about the problems with such reductive and essentialised divisions. Bifurcating the urban fabric creates dangers territorial conceptions and in many way reifies boundary - almost regressing debate to early 20th century
siedlungsarchaologie (settlement archaeology) - advocating notions of
Gustaf Kossinna's
kulturkries (culture area).
I feel our project - through the optics of social research, archaeology and art - has the potential to offer constructive complexity to the conception of Dublin's geography. Most critically, it should add two more dimensions to the standard 2D boundary lines of N:S bifurcations. Adding both depth and temporality.
It's an ambitious goal, but one certainly attainable - developing a process that both captures and enlivens the flow of a 4D conception of social space in Dublin in which all civic participants can feel they have representation and a stake.
Let the comments and debate begin...
Labels: archaeology, sociology, theory
The archaeological sensibility - a radical example from Argos
The
Metamedia Lab at Stanford University under the stewardship of
Michael Shanks has supported the development of some rather provocative reflexive practice in archaeological experssion. One example is
Archaeography - the digi-project managed by
Christopher Witmore (now a fellow at Brown University).
Stated briefly, the archaeological sensibility is that capricious sensation (both embodied and intellectual) experienced by humans today which suggests that things encountered index or embody complex temporal possibilities. The archaeology of the contemporary past suggests that by seeing the past as a complex of things experienced today, the past is liberated from boundaries and distinctions built into its rendering.
Simply stated, things from different times, or of different peoples or just things which wouldn't normally be thought of as existing together are approached as co-temporal happenings. A mesolithic flint or a medieval wooden comb or a piece of rubbish left from last week's binmen are all of the same temporality because we experience them together, presently, now, as part of living of the contemporary. And by experiencing pasts in this liberated contemporary sense, many new possibilities could be made evident - such as in
Chris Witmore's photographic studies of squatter's dwellings in Argos, Greece.
Are Chris' photos any less 'archaeological' than an excavation of a bronze age settlement?
Labels: archaeology, theory
Material Musings
I have a question re Ian's recent email outlining his prooposed approach to material culture in the context of Placing Voices. The question circles around the stated intention to abjure the traditional academic approach of documenting and creating 'typologies or evidenced based argumentation for the existence of specific identities'. Instead, immersion in the affective practices of the flaneur and recorder of stories is proposed. My question is: are the outcomes of these experiential encounters to be reshaped/processed into academic interpretations or do they exist as self-explanatory stories or evidence in their own right? Are these experiences to be converted in any sense into analysis? I'm not clear on this.This question is partly provoked by Daniel Miller's latest book The Comfort of Things which I'm reading at the moment. Miller's book takes the form of a series of elegantly crafted short stories of encounters with people in their homes in a London Street. The people, their homes, their contents and their lifeworlds are evoked in pieces that could easily pass for short-stories in the conventional literary sense. But Miller is professor of Anthropology at London University, and I'm having difficulty identifying the particular disciplinary practice involved here. Does the new epistemology involve an increasingly blurred line between the creative and the analytical?
Labels: archaeology, material culture, theory
Material Culture Mission Statement: Subjects not objects
I am interested in encountering and documenting the material culture (things) of the contemporary Monto as subjects of inspiration/inquiry rather than as scientific objects of interrogation/data.
The modern construction of a ‘material culture’ as something distinct from the embodied experience of the contemporary – as something separate or ‘other’ – I feel is an impediment to the articulation of the complex, constellated stories of places such as the Monto and Clanbrassil Street.
Rather than attempting to document and create typologies or evidenced based argumentation for the existence of specific identities, my work will focus on things as inspiration for storytelling.
The appearance of things and the story of their encounter and their subsequent ability to act as mnemonic devices, triggering old and new stories (both ‘true’ and ‘false’ and a mixture between) will the subject of study.
It is intended that this ‘show and tell’ approach will allow for a rich synergy with the digital storytelling aspects of the project as well as the sociological interviews.
The strategy for the study will include:
-Walks of the area (as a flaneur) with frenetic and iterative encounter with things of the streetscapes
-Show and tell sessions where members of the community will have the opportunity to bring forward things which they feel are significant
-To be conducted in collaboration with Alice and Darcy’s work
-Case-studies of specific residences/addresses
-These will be determined through the identification of study areas by Tadhg and Paddy’s research and Cormac and Alice’s ability to arrange access to premises
-These will incorporate both conversations with the residents in some instances as well as personal explorations of the items of the house
-Ideally it will be possible to discover how things are utilized in different ways to create stories (Stories with things)
-Some will be representative (e.g. mantlepieces) – supporting identifications with places/peoples/memories
-Some will be hidden (e.g. piles of things or bottoms of boxes) – unintended memories, forgotten traces, obscured identifiations
-Some will be incidental/accidental residue (e.g. rubbish)
All things will be photographed digitally, with the intention of uploading them either into a weblog or into a storytelling engine or photo-spatial engine (e.g. Photosynth).
The deliverable will be a Story with Things – showing how both ‘old’ and ‘new’ things interact creating complex environments for memory activation, identification maintenance and ideological representation. In this way, it should provide a process-based time-slice of the lived negotiation of contemporary space.
Labels: archaeology, material culture, theory
