A group of photographers and artists are documenting the accretion of the ‘underground’ urban landscape through graffiti art. Based in San Francisco, but also looking at graffiti in Los Angeles and New York, Cassidy Curtis and his team at Graffiti Archaeology document the changes through time of graffiti art at several tagging locations. All of…
abjection
Fresh scars on the body of archaeology
Note: a more detailed version of this entry with photographs is forthcoming in Past Bodies: An Archaeology of Bodily Practices, edited by Dusan Boric & John Robb, to be published by Berghahn Books. Forensic experts including a team of archaeologists examined bodies from the site of Batajnica near Belgrade, capital of Serbia & Montenegro. It…
An Archaeology of the Spanish Civil War
I was moved by a scene in Atom Egoyan’s film “Ararat” (2002). One of the main characters, a young Canadian of Armenian descent, goes back to Turkey to see the land that witnessed one of the most horrendous genocides of the twentieth century. He contemplates the landscape and films it in video. His gaze is…