Art & Archaeology: Uncomfortable Archival Landscapes

Abstract

This paper conceptualises practice in the space between and beyond Art & Archaeology as a zone where disciplinary certainties and known practices are unsettled, expanded and re-cast. In the course of the paper, we will outline our current thinking about heritage landscapes as places and temporalities for engagement in the practice of the para-archive. This research is informed by our interdisciplinary fieldwork in the heritage landscape (specifically at Scalan Mills, Moray) which has mobilised multiple textures of place, for example; locality, geography, labour and memory. For us, landscape functions as a kind of living archive, however, we are sceptical of the privileged relation between archive, law and authority (Derrida, 1995). Therefore, in this paper we will think through our interdisciplinary research in the context of the development of creative ‘para-archives’ (Slager, 2015: 82) which facilitate: 'the perspective of desirology: a thinking in terms of new orders of affective associations, of fluid taxonomies, and…intellectual and artistic pleasure linked to derange the symbolic order.' (Slager, 2015: 83) Responding to the additional challenge of the intra-SARS-CoV-2 discomfort zone, we seek to surface creative practices, to activate archival disruptions and expand pedagogical approaches to the articulation of uncomfortable archival landscapes. The global pandemic has brought into sharp focus the need to re-conceptualise visions of space, experiences of place and archival practices. During a virtual fieldtrip undertaken to Dumbarton Rock students were able to access historic and contemporary texts, visual, cartographic and topographic materials from Scotland’s National Record of the Historic Environment archive (https://canmore.org.uk/). Along with the student cohort, we aimed to enable the co-design and co-production of a remotely delivered workshop and fieldtrip, followed by reflective discussions about our collective conceptualisations of landscapes of discomfort. The archaeological fieldwork in the virtual realm provides a context for students to engage in desirology as a catalyst for deranging, re-associating and re-imagining the archive in creative ways.