Not Yet... art and archeology in the context of urban renewal, a one day symposium at the Arnolfini in Bristol organised by Situations 28th april 2007
An archaeologist told me that when they find something and they don’t know what it is they say it’s a ritual object. I think that any deliberate action under taken consciously can be seen as ritual.
So I was asked to consider future archaeology and I have no idea what that is, it seems to me that the future is happening now, we are weaving it like so many spider webs with our thoughts and behaviour.
I founded Climbing Club in 2002 to explore the buildings of the city of London by climbing all over them. Climbing Club was started as a faculty of the University of Openness – a group of us inspired by the free universities especially the Copenhagen free university - we wondered what would happen if we started a university and made it open through a Wiki. For me physical education had to be at the heart of such an open experiment in teaching and learning, through physical education I mean taking the bodily sensations and embodied experience as the first principle. Climbing club met monthly for three years to explore the banks and churches the textures of the City of London. On a Sunday the City is empty and we had a sense of ‘the cats away and the mice will play’ a friend asked what happens if those who work in the city are encouraged to experience their familiar environment differently through climbing. As a result of this I worked with a risk analyst to make risk reward curves for climbing on banks, he usually makes these curves to advise people about investing and at that time he was advising on Northern Kurdistan. I also held a Risk conference on May 1st 2005 using hands free mobile phones to engage in a telephone conference on risk, on the agenda was the difference between direct physical risk of climbing and the remote risk that the regime of the city of London inflicts across the world. Attending on the Phone was New Left Review’s Robin Blackburn and in person and in leather brogues a risk manager from JP Morgan.
As another exploration in skewing educational hierarchies I found myself a teacher called Callum who was seven at the time, to teach me how to move creatively through the streets and together we made the urban street training video. He demonstrates movements in relation to the drab housing estate where he lives giving them names like the spinning pig’s tail and the wall wedgie.
Urban climbing and the street training were blended and applied in different European cities where people were invited to explore the boundaries social, physical and psychological that we are unknowingly subject to until we start swinging, scrambling, pissing on, climbing and/or nurturing them. In Berlin the notion of freedom of movement was explored on intellectual and physical levels simultaneously by a group of people who included capoeiristas, children, workers with the Voice Refugee Forum, architecture students, artists, a yoga teacher and art theorist. This resulted in a map that was given away in the show Guide to Risk in Berlin 2006 at arttransponder. Engaging with a new place can be daunting and it takes effort just as when a spider flings out the first piece of frame silk to a distant point to begin her web. To transect territory then begin to circle around and weave meaning in relation to everything and everyone encountered.
Developing and building on existing skills for being in the streets creatively was the main focus of the field research for Future Archeology with Sitiuations in Bristol. I worked with a group and we discovered that we were always training, always developing the ways we moved, acted, observed and thought. We trained for a few hours with the boys who do Parkour in Bristol city centre, we trained through watching shoppers negotiate for space, noticing the ways that teenage girls were articulating the space of the galleries shopping centre by shouting out random men’s names from the upper level. In her book For Space Doreen Massey writes that space is always the product of interrelations, that it is always under construction and it contains the possibility of the existence of multiplicity. The idea that we produce space was tested out as we noted how behaviour in a place effected it’s culture, we watched as small creative acts really changed the place and the person doing them fleetingly. A question I’ve been asking is If practiced regularly like a martial art do incremental changes accumulate and transform both the ‘Street Trainer’ and the street in line with our creative impulses creating temporary autonomous zones, making people and place less subject to our culture’s dominant forces?
UK MC Lady Sovereign was quoted as saying that there is a flight indoors by the middle classes evidenced by all the home improvement shows on TV she says people are staying at home to keep away from people like her. Rather than staying in doors listening to the news that induces fear can we develop the confidence to go out, interact with our environment and local people and actually ‘be’ the local news?
I still don’t know what future archaeology is but it seems the future of spider webs is bio steel a product engineered by a biotech company that has bred goats with spider silk in their milk because it is an exceptionally strong and flexible material.
http://www.nexiabiotech.com/en/01_tech/01-bst.php∞
Towards the end of the research we spent some time with Sarah May’s baby as he got all over the, dirt, the textures and details of the street his total emersion and constant experimentation with the phenomena he encountered were instructional.
We spent many hours walking around with the Broadmead development outlined on the Bristol map, I discovered that it traces the shape of a condor which must be the totem animal for this location. The condor symbolises rebirth and it seems that a useful aim for our thoughts and behaviour in the streets might be to create the right conditions for the interdisciplinary shamans of the future.
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