Experimental Heritage as Practice: Approaching the Past through the Present at the Intersection of Art and Archaeology

Abstract

This article presents the emerging transdisciplinary practice of Experimental Heritage as performed within an ongoing Irish-Swedish research project involving artists and archaeologists. The project is undertaken simultaneously in western Ireland and south-eastern Sweden. It explores the chosen Irish and Swedish landscapes of Clare and Öland, their similarities and differences, with the aid of combined and integrated artistic and archaeological practices. The starting points for common explorations are: stone and water, movement and time/the multitemporal, and the tangible and intangible aspects of landscape experience. In a transdisciplinary process we explore new ways of combining art, archaeology and heritage within and between these landscapes. One path towards fulfilling the aims is to explore art, archaeology and heritage through the senses. A phenomenological landscape perspective and an eco-cultural approach is combined with Performance Studies and movement-based practice. These perspectives and methodologies are paired with artistic and archaeological approaches to research such as those conducted through poetry, music, performance, visual arts, physical surveys, mapping and excavations. Methods of working have developed from walking in the landscape to sketching, through visuals, sound and movement, group dialogue, team building and exploring the materiality of making. Group movement-based workshops are used to support receptivity and inner listening for decision making through somatic principles and the senses. The project encourages transdisciplinary as well as translocal practice to arrive at new approaches and perspectives on how the past matters to us in the present and how it might have an impact on the future. To achieve both transdisciplinary and translocal ways of working through art and archaeology/heritage, we need to expand beyond conventional art and archaeology/heritage research, communication and presentation within the well-known framework of universities, cultural history museums and art institutions. The constraints of these conventions are substituted by alternative settings in the landscape. This landscape-based practice includes method development across disciplines, times and geographic distances. It also includes collaborations with people from local communities that can contribute their perspectives, experiences and stories to the explorations. The advantage of Experimental Heritage as practice in the landscape is its ability to challenge our current worldview to better understand other times and cultures as well as our own. This in turn provides us with new tools to create alternative futures resting on care and respect for the need for diversity and breaking not only with boundaries set up between nature and culture but also hierarchies of central and peripheral. We intend to find out more about the multitemporal layers in the landscapes surrounding us and how they relate to our inner landscapes of multitemporal perception. The combination and equal roles of artists and archaeologists as well as the contributions of researchers and members of the local communities in this work is crucial. Equality and diversity encourage transdisciplinary knowledge development.