prehistory and performance – an experiment in site specifics

In Göteborg this week I have been returning to the work of arts company Brith Gof – site specific performance. And theatre/archaeology – the rearticulation of fragments of the past as real time event. The context is my argument that the heritage industry is just that – work performed on what is left of the…

In theory: the death of literature

An intelligent feature in The Guardian by Andrew Gallix on Tuesday 10 January. The topic – “we’ve heard it all before” – [Link]. “We come too late to say anything which has not been said already,” lamented La Bruyère at the end of the 17th century. The fact that he came too late even to…

Olivier – Le sombre abîme du temps

Laurent Olivier’s wonderful book Le sombre abîme du temps has just appeared in translation (as The dark abyss of time: memory and archaeology) – [Link] Laurent offers profound elaboration of the fundamental insight that the past is all around us, before us, in material traces, that presence is filled with the past, that the future…

landscape aesthetics – tactics (continued)

From a conversation in the Dun Cow, Durham (with Bianca Carpeneti and Chris Witmore). Topic – archaeology, ruins and the picturesque landscape. The allure, the ideology, the challenge to avoid cliché. How do we deal with archaeological landscapes today? Should I just give up photography? As a tainted medium? This is too simple a response…

Norham Station

I can’t help but be fascinated with what is slipping from memory and becoming “history”. And the romance of the railway. Just found a wonderful site called “Forgotten relics” – it has a page on a favorite village of mine (the castle straight out of Scott’s “Marmion”) on a branch line in the Scottish borders…