It’s all over the news today – the claim that the 500 year old body found by archaeologists under a parking lot in Leicester UK is that of Richard III, the last Plantagenet King of England who fell at Bosworth Field in 1485, losing his throne to Henry Tudor. For much of the popular press…
(past) presences
rephotography – Road&Track
Photography frames and fixes This can be enabling – seeing things through a detail, microcosmic part for whole – synechdoche – the oligopticon, where macro ladidary detail ironically offers more than the wide angle or panorama (contrast the panopticon). The world in a grain of sand. And disabling – frames restrict and compress, and fixity can…
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…
the archaeological uncanny
Gabriel Moshenska has sent me his recent and very neat article about the archaeological uncanny in the ghost stories of MR James. Gabriel is quite right, I think, to highlight the connection between Freud’s unheimlich, ghosts, and the haunting persistence, sometimes malevolent, of the past – MR James made much of the curses that can…
Heritage Open Days
More confirmation of the spread of that contemporary and popular sensibility attuned to the resonances of pasts-in-the-present. English Heritage, the government agency, has put up nearly half a million dollars for a weekend of 4500 heritage open houses. This is the biggest heritage event in the UK this year. Peter Saunders in his re-creation of…
chorography – then and now
Chorography – a workshop at Durham University July 10 2012 – [Link] Summer fieldwork. I am less focused on the excavations at Binchester this year [Link]. I am pulling together my long-running research into the region – the English Scottish borders. How do you tell of such a place? All that is there, and has…
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