... constantly seek the unconcious under the concious, the subjective value under the objective evidence, the reverie beneath the experiment.

Gaston Bachelard

Matter

Gesture

and Soul

In this seminar the topic was our past, present, and future relationship to nature seen from the perspectives of Art and Archaeology. 

More specifically; Ochre.

In the symposium, 13th of November, our speakers took us on an artistic, scientific, multi-disciplinary and multi-layered trip through matter, space and time via the agency and attributes of Ochre; an important agent in the development of human cognition and behavior the last 500 000 years. 

We visited caves in the Dordogne region in France and we met Titanium white pigment dug out from the mountains of Norway. 

In his latest book Inclusions, our key-note speaker Nicolas Bourriaud states: “The Western world has blinded itself into considering Art as the “double” of reality. In fact, it represents a model for action, a process for activating scattered forces”.

His talk has the title: “The Sublime in the Anthropocene”.

→Watch the symposium online←

Rhythm is everywhere. It is breath and heartbeat; it is the sound of a drum and the repetitive flint carved lines in stone done by a prehistoric human being. It is the flickering screen and a million digital processes too small to see. It is engraved in the depth of our minds and bodies. It is how we remember. It is in how we walk, how we talk, how we write and how we act together. 

According to Encyclopedia Britannica, rhythm (Greek rhythmos, derived from rhein, “to flow”) is an ordered alternation of contrasting elements, and according to Roland Barthes both painting and writing started with the same gesture, one which was neither figurative nor semantic, but simply rhythmic.

In this seminar we will approach rhythm through contemporary artistic and archaeological imagination starting with some engraved and painted lines drawn by our stone age ancestors in France and South Africa. 

See the exhibition online. Download the publication here.

In this publication, and in the exhibition which it follows, the floating roles we all have; as spectators, scientists, artists, the posterity, and the future, are activated and even unified. The different content of the publication has been juxtaposed and placed in layers on top of each other to explore what kind of light might shine from the pages and from the exhibition halls. It may be the light of a palimpsest. A layered light. A light with many shadows and with paradoxical memories. 

The work involving both the exhibition and this publication has, in its totality, taken place during the 2020-21 Corona pandemic. Thus, the work in the project has become unusually lonely, erratic, and delayed, but also strangely reversed. The result has become more than simply planned individual approaches to specific themes; it now also reflects the manifestation of knowledge in general. The original intention was to meet and to work together early in the project period and to produce and display results later. The timeline for the project has, because of the pandemic, been turned around. Both exhibition and publication are now not only visible artistic and scientific manifestations from (a few) discussions and fieldwork, but also a fresh start for new discussions, new forms of fieldwork, new questions, and new artistic approaches for the project, and for the public.

See the exhibition online.  -  Download the publication here.