PARTICIPANTS / EXHIBITIONS / TIMELINE / PUBLICATIONS / PHD /
A cross-disciplinary artistic research project (initiated in October 2019) that explores and investigates various encounters and alignments between contemporary art and archaeology. The project is centered around two geographical hubs: Fontainebleau in France and the Blombos Cave in South Africa.
• The primary goal is to create autonomous and collaborative artistic, poetic, and scientific responses to prehistoric art and its contemporary interpretations. The project aims to foster a deeper understanding of both contemporary and prehistoric artistic expressions, as well as the human condition in these respective eras. Participating artists and archaeologists will develop independent projects while also engaging in workshops, seminars, and collaborative artistic and scientific endeavors.
• The secondary goal of Matter, Gesture and Soul is to establish an international, research network at the University of Bergen, enhancing expertise in transdisciplinary artistic and scientific collaborations, with art as the central driving force.
The project is generously supported by NARP, KMD, and Global Challenges (UiB).
Geir Harald Samuelsen
geir.samuelsen@uib.no
An interdisciplinary seminar/workshop in the intersection between contemporary art and archaeology
By: Elizabeth Velliky (SapienCE, UiB), Larissa Mendoza Straffon (UiB) and Geir Harald Samuelsen (KMD, UiB)
The early use of symbols and by proxy “symbolic thinking” has long been used as the benchmark for what archaeologists call modern human behavior. As such, a great depth of research exists on how we define symbolism, how present-day researchers identify this in the material record, and how materials as symbols shaped our early cognition. In this workshop/seminar, we aim to explore each of these concepts through the lens of technique and craft theory (and practice), where we invoke one of the key thoughts in that “…we do not fully understand the things that we have not made ourselves (Sennett Reference Sennett2008, 7).”
Employing this perspective thus allows the application of different mediums used in symbolic expression such as bones and teeth, ivory, stones, rock walls, and earth pigments. By focusing on the practices and performances surrounding the materials, our workshop opens doors to perspectives from different fields of research, including archaeology, art, and psychology, while simultaneously spanning different temporal and geographical contexts.
Our goal is to foster transdisciplinary discussion on how humans created symbols in the past, and ultimately how they shaped humans up to the present day.
In this seminar we aim to activate and possibly re-think concepts and terms used in archaeology and contemporary art through presentations, discussions, and material interaction
In this seminar, the focus was on our past, present, and future relationship with nature, viewed through the perspectives of Art and Archaeology.
More specifically: Ochre.
During the symposium on November 13th, our speakers guided us on an artistic, scientific, multidisciplinary, and multilayered journey through matter, space, and time, exploring the agency and attributes of ochre—an important catalyst in the development of human cognition and behavior over the past 500,000 years.
We ventured into caves in the Dordogne region of France and encountered titanium white pigment extracted from the mountains of Norway.
In his latest book, Inclusions, our keynote 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 was titled: “The Sublime in the Anthropocene.”
THE ACADEMY STUDENT OCHRE WORKSHOP
(Painting Class, KMD)
at KMD, November, 2023
Nicolas Bourriaud (F) - Key note
The Sublime in the Anthropocene
Ochre lifeworlds: perspectives from archaeology and deep time
Signs in nature, from memories to future, a relation to the surrounding
Marte Johnslien (N)
TiO2: The Materiality of White
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.
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.
