Elbow & C&C Residency

Elbow C&C Gallery 5th September – 4th October 2015The Elbow, the part of the human body that a blind or partially sighted person takes hold of, four fingers on the inside, thumb on the outside; holding with a firm grip to assist them with navigation. It is a common guiding technique linking two people into an unfamiliar choreography.This summer C&C Gallery hosted an innovative residency programme, transforming the gallery space into a dynamic studio environment in order to respond to ideas surrounding the condition of blindness. During this time eight artists (and two archaeologists; Andrew Jones and Marta Diaz-Gaurdamino) variously came and went, engaging with a whole repertoire of processes, from casting to laser scanning, leaving a variety of traces of their activities. Much of the work, arrived at through a collaborative approach has sought to obliquely cast a shadow across the subject, remaining open towards the process of making, and the work remains in a state of uncertainty even at the time of writing.During a workshop in the space hosted by John Dickinson-Lilley, the artists wore blind glasses and stumbled rather pathetically around the gallery and the local high street, feeling unsure, insecure and inept, grounded only by the feeling of the floor beneath ones feet and ones fingers upon a companions elbow. Within the space; chalk lines, floor to ceiling columns and laser scanning targets have created an installation for measurement, where diverse material usage- including borax, expanding foam and cat litter humorously confound expectation

Rethinking Iberian 'Warrior' stelae: a multidisciplinary investigation of Mirasiviene and its connection to Setefilla (Lora del Río, Seville, Spain)

Iberian ‘warrior’ stelae have captured the imagination of researchers and the public for more than a century. Traditionally, stelae were considered ‘de-contextualised’ monuments, and research typically focused on the study of their iconography, paying little or no attention to their immediate contexts. As a result, despite the large number of these stelae known to date (c. 140) and the ample body of literature that has dealt with them, fundamental questions remain unanswered. This paper aims to demonstrate the potential of a multidisciplinary and contextual approach to push forward the research agenda on these monuments through a case study. Firstly, we introduce the Mirasiviene stela and the methods deployed for its investigation, which include a variety of digital imaging techniques, petrography, pXRF, intensive survey and multiscalar spatial analysis. Secondly, we discuss the results in relation to three main topics: stela biography, social practices and landscape context. Comparisons to the well-known nearby Bronze Age and Iron Age site of Setefilla are made throughout the discussion. Ultimately, this paper makes a case for the stelae of Mirasiviene and Setefilla being polyvalent monuments made by local artisans, that served both as landmarks and memorials in connection with dense late second and early first millennium BCE settlement patterns in the region. Probably linked to elites, ‘houses’ or kin groups of this time, stelae were set in symbolically charged places, liminal spaces nearby water, burials and pathways, attracting a range of ritual activities throughout the centuries. The study of the newly discovered Mirasiviene stela shows that multidisciplinary, cutting-edge non-destructive archaeology can shed significant new light on these prehistoric monuments, thus providing a glimpse of what in our opinion is a paradigm shift in the research of similar monuments throughout Europe

Annihilation Event

Annihilation Event has no singular origin, but many strands and streams. This is a project about copies, prints, scans, derivations, reconstructions, casts, and virtual models.The 6 day programme in the Lethaby Gallery will bring together a contrary group of artists, archivists, archaeologists, historians, technical experts and theorists from all over Europe. The scheduled events will operate as an experiment, an exchange, a chance to inhabit the Lethaby with a constellation of objects, machines, speculative processes and performances, an unprecedented opportunity for collisions and collusions.In particle physics, annihilation is the process that occurs when a subatomic particle collides with its respective antiparticle to produce other particles. A particle collision is a useful metaphor for the unruly and generative process of transdiciplinary exchange, of bringing disciplines and generations into contact: the productive ground of cultural participation. That exchange is something that we see at the root, or the radical, of art school present and future. Our 3D imaging project has produced a ruin of the Granary building and in that sense has un-formed our inherited institutional structures. What we are figuring out here relies not so much on the shell of a building, but on its infrastructures, connections and collectives built by affiliation: a facilitation of workflows.Rather than new critiques, it is new cartographies that we need.Cartographies not of the Empire, but of the lines of flight out of it.How is it to be done? We need maps. Not maps of what is off the map, but navigation maps. Maritime maps. Orientation tools. That do not try to explain or represent what lies inside the different archipelagos of desertion, but tell us how to reach them