Coming soon – What’s the Future for the Past?, Cambridge Festival of Ideas,29 October 2016

On Saturday I’ll be at Cambridge Festival of Ideas taking part in a panel on the future alongside long-time compatriots Rachael Kiddey and Sarah May considering pasts, futures and the varied presents in between. I’ll be talking about Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie’s Prospection and our recent art-archaeology fieldwork on the North West Cambridge development site where I’ve been working for three years. The gist of my work there – carried out as part of a multi-disciplinary research team – has been to avoid standard archaeological recording and instead allow the site to impact on my own practice. On Saturday I will talk a little about this work and some of the concepts arising from it under the tentative (and maybe undeservedly grand) title, A Visual Manifesto for the Archaeology of Construction, and featuring such fun as the juxtaposition of different stages of completeness, erratics, seepage, palette and my favourite: construction pastoral.

Here’s the abstract for the event. Tickets available here:  http://www.festivalofideas.cam.ac.uk/events/whats-future-past

Who or what decides what data, what objects, will survive to tell future generations what we were like? How do we know what should or could become the ‘heritage’ of the future?

‘Prospection’ is a visionary art project tracking the development of the new NW Cambridge development and its inhabitants, by artists Karen Guthrie & Nina Pope. With their team of archaeologists, sociologists and creatives, they will visit NWC annually for the next 25 years, recording its places and people and storing these for posterity at Cambridgeshire Archives. Now into year 3, the Prospection team’s records have ranged from archaeological surveys to short films to soil samples.

Inspired by ‘Prospection’, this event presents a panel of leading heritage experts including Sarah May (Research Associate, UCL Institute of Archaeology), Rachael Kiddey (Research Associate, University of York & Editorial Assistant at the Independent Social Research Foundation) and James Dixon (Museum of London Archaeology) who will present a thought-provoking array of fieldwork and research exploring what the future holds for the past and what the past holds for the future.

The panel will be followed by refreshments and a chance to browse the boxes of the first two years’ findings of ‘Prospection’