How do we work on the remains of the past?
In the great garbage heap that is the debris of history, the most surreal of associations occur - the ox scapula by the button, by the clay tablet, by the broken mirror ... mingled with building rubble.
We might think of this quality of our relationship, our encounter with the past in devising appropriate ways of researching, writing, imaging, mediating the past.
Parataxis - the juxtaposition of evidences without elaborating their possible links.
Katachresis - the forced juxtaposition of evidences that have no intrinsic connection
Making connections. Forcing connections. Past and present ...
On the relations with a creative aesthetics/poetics - see my notes on Traumwerk, databasing and wabi sabi - Design Principles : Design philosophy - heretical empirics.
This is what I attempted in the work Three Rooms - a juxtaposition of three forensic portfolios on a bedroom in Victorian west Wales, a dining room in ancient Corinth, and a garrett in Whitechapel, London.
Here is what I wrote by way of introduction and explanation:
The Three Rooms are not analogies, each of the other, though the juxtaposition is not thereby arbitrary. This is a comparative study, but not in the usual sense. The three rooms have in common an archaeological theme - the remains of something that lingers, in different ways; they also share something that may be called the performative. The technique I have used here is one described elsewhere as parataxis and katachresis (Theatre/Archaeology, page 25; see also Experiencing the Past, page 188-190) - a forcible juxtaposition designed to produce frictions.
I have not taken an explicitly interpretive strategy of peeling back the layers, digging deep for significance. Rather, layer is piled on layer so that the weight will create metamorphosis or decomposition, as the pieces grind at each other, as catalysts (words, themes, images, metaphors, whatever) take effect and amalgams or connections emerge, where there probably should be none. So my aim is not primarily an epistemological one of establishing knowledge of these three rooms and their associated people and events. I am not developing a model of the archaic Greek sanctuary, or of nineteenth century medical science, or of postmodern London, or of something between. The aim is more an ontological one of making manifest some of the features of these conglomerations of people, things, and events. I see this as potentially complementary to the explanatory and interpretive strategies of a social archaeology. This rhizomatic method is outlined in the methodological chapter of my book Art and the Early Greek State (1999).
