I’m going to be at the World Archaeological Congress next week talking about urban archaeology, art and sustainability.
On Thursday 1 September I will be taking part in the session, Breaking the Frame: Art and Archaeology, with the following paper:
Site-specificity in an international context
This paper arises from a collaboration between four organisations in the UK and Japan which has, over the course of 2016, examined the practical relationship between art and archaeology in urban regeneration contexts in both countries. Drawing on group fieldwork, an international seminar in July 2016 and my own long-running research into developing art-inspired site-specific archaeologies, the paper will outline the results of the London-Japan project, present some initial conclusions arising from it concerning the practicalities of site-specific working in an international context, and detail the contribution of the project to wider debates in art-archaeology.
That sounds very generic, but the paper will be looking at whether different kinds of interpretive framework in art/archaeology give us different understandings of site and how we might work differently to overlap or join these. It will be looking primarily at the work of Nobuaki Date (Date-san), Toshio Matsui, Laura Oldfield Ford and Hilary Powell.
My second paper, part of a session called Urban Heritage and Sustainability will look at the idea of archaeology for sustainability, the different kinds of archaeology that we might develop in pursuit of environmental, social and economic sustainability, and the liklihood that these different archaeologies cannot be reconciled into one central effort. Abstract below:
Sustainability and politically-engaged archaeology.
Economic, environmental and social sustainability are different things and do not necessarily have the same motivation. Each benefits different people in different ways and what is objectively best for any people in any place at any time is rarely clear. This paper contends that different kinds of sustainability require, or create, different relationships with archaeology and require archaeologists to be socially and politically aware of the situations in which they find themselves working. Archaeology can mitigate or mobilise, provide direction or distraction. This paper will outline the benefits of promoting more politically-engaged practice from private consultancy to community archaeology.
My attendance at WAC is part of a collaborative research project on comparative art and archaeology practice between the UK and Japan supported by the Daiwa Foundation, MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology) and OCCPA.
James Dixon Archaeology 