I was quite pleased with the special Blurb edition of the review of theatre/archaeology that Mike Pearson and I just published (good quality imagery, reasonable typography and layout) [Link] [Link] So I ran up a new portfolio of my rephotographed daguerreotypes – “Ghosts in the Mirror”. Ghosts in the Mirror by Michael Shanks Here…
memory practices
political engagement, contemporary art, archaeology
Six Lines of Flight: Shifting Geographies in Contemporary Art has just closed at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art [Link] [Link] The topic of the exhibition – contemporary art in six “far-flung” cities not typically defined as traditional centers of the art world: Beirut, Cali, Cluj-Napoca, Ho Chi Minh City, San Francisco, Tangier. Ostensibly this is…
Ben Cullen
On the anniversary of the untimely and sudden death of Ben Cullen in 1995. [Link] [Link] [Link] I dedicated my book, The Archaeological Imagination [Link], published in April, to Ben. It is seventeen years today since he died. Uncanny. I wonder what I would say to him about the book, that might reveal how much…
the culture of archaeology
Highway 128 Boonville California Since I moved to the United States a dozen years ago, I have spent a good deal of time in Northern California in a small back woods town called Boonville in the Anderson Valley on Route 128 as it makes its way to the Mendocino Coast. Always an agricultural community, logging,…
this happened here – presence and authenticity in an archaeological sensibility
Gary (Devore) has brought my attention to a remarkable new publication from the Panstwowe Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau [Link] “The Auschwitz Album” or “Lili Jacob Album” comprises about 200 photographs taken by the German SS and depicting the arrival of a transport of Hungarian Jews at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp in 1944. This new collection takes 31…
critical heritage as design
To continue the argument from my previous posts – [Link] [Link] – that heritage, the (legacy) of the past in the present, is best conceived as a process of working on the past in the present – as a process of design. I have just returned from a trip to Göteborg, that most wonderfully open…
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