... this blog is an ongoing investigation into modes of suspension that started as a research project in Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths College in 2011 ...

Sunday 12 June 2011

Disassembly-reassembly

Inspired by Fareed Armaly's ongoing project Shar(e)d Domains



“Archaeology begins with the shards. This is the most evident type of remain you will find excavated on an archeological site, because pottery was everywhere and broken everywhere.”

Archaeology begins with the shard and history obliges with an endless amount. As a museum science, archeology’s analysis of history operates with agreed-upon classifications. “Diagnostic shards” are collected as the more telltale rims, handles, bases, and parts with special features that identify the vessel. “Body shards” that seem featureless are deemed without meaning, unnecessary to archive.

[…]
My artwork begins through an archeological beginning: the shard. It matches the exhibition’s emphasis on history as a collection of fragments by operating through one - the Gaza amphora. Thus I commissioned a new ‘excavation’ of this amphora. A computer-assisted imaging process relieved the physical artifact of its surface appearance. Because nothing is “featureless” anymore in this resulting new shell of precise, depthless vectors of information coordinates, the distinction between body and diagnostic shards is suspended. This new artifact’s information from depthless vectors points to the exhibition’s unfinished center: the Gaza Archeological Museum.

[…]
The archeologists reassembling the Gaza-Geneva Amphora required montaging diagnostic and body shards, thus introducing one further element: the seam. This is the space between the original artifact as a construction and the event of its destruction. The seam functions as a chronicle of correspondences produced by the archeologist’s labor as they attempt to reconstitute the historical artifact in a present state.

In museological discourse the artifact serves as an expression of the contemporary routed through a historical condition. The vessel here is inversed, outlined, and suspended in a tenuos state of equilbrium that no longer contains but exposes. It reminds us that it is impossible to reconstruct history but only our current relation to the past as active discourse.

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