Terminal Hut

Abstract

Presented here is an account of the journey of artists Ian Dawson and Louisa Minkin and archaeologists Andy Jones and Marta Diaz Guardamino Uribe over the period of five years, 2012 to 2017. This guidebook to our journey follows the Making a Mark project itinerary: visits to museums, to archives and to the sites and landscapes of the British Neolithic. Through these material encounters a set of works began to configure as a collaboration. Our interest began with the technological imaging processes that archaeologists use to record sites and to enable new interactions with objects. We learned these techniques by applying them to our immediate environment, a South London housing estate under 'regeneration'. This was a kind of ham rescue archaeology, salvaging digital samples of material culture from the long boarded-up shop units before they were gutted out. The units now temporarily house artists; a generalised instrumentalization in the transition from social housing to capital stock. We made several iterations of the exhibition Pictures not Homes [2015-17] each animated and re-fabricated the data we had captured in the derelict shops. The project as a whole brought into sharp focus sites of home and community, possession and dispossession, belonging and alienation, bringing to scrutiny places we used to live, where we gathered, marks we left, things we used to hold. The Neolithic objects and sites we encountered threw into question the values and contexts we assign to art objects in our current moment. It made us think again about the relation of sculpture and site, how we carry things with us, how we work together, what an exhibition might be. We used the methods of our exchange as the infrastructure for a six-day event programme, Annihilation Event, in the Lethaby Gallery at Central Saint Martins, London in March 2017. Annihilation Event produced a set of encounters in the gallery with participants from all over Europe. Contemporary artworks and historic objects were installed alongside the Neolithic Monkton-Up-Wimborne chalk block. Active production took place in situ, 3D imaging and production apparatus were tested, workflows developed, theoretical positions were performed, pedagogies worked through. The inherited institution of art school itself was ruined virtually and reformed.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Ian Dawson: orcid.org/0000-0002-3695-8582

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