Theory adrift: The matter of archaeological theorizing

At a possible transition towards a ‘flat’, post-human or new-materialist environment, many have suggested that archaeological theory and theorizing is changing course; turning to metaphysics; leaning towards the sciences; or, even is declared dead. Resonating with these concerns, and drawing on our fieldwork on a northern driftwood beach, this article suggests the need to rethink fundamental notions of what theory is – its morphological being – and how it behaves and takes form. Like drift matter on an Arctic shore, theories are adrift. They are not natives of any particular territory, but nomads in a mixed world. While they are themselves of certain weight and figure, it matters what things they bump into, become entangled with, and moved by. Based on this, we argue that theories come unfinished and fragile. Much like things stranding on a beach they don’t simply ‘add up’ but can become detached, fragmented, turned and transfigured. Rather than seeing this drift as rendering them redundant and out of place, it is this nomadism and ‘weakness’ that sustains them and keeps them alive.

Text by Þóra Pétursdóttir,  Bjørnar Olsen

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1469605317737426

Kon Wajiro’s Archaeology of Present Times

Japanese architect, sociologist, and educator Kon Wajiro was living in Tokyo when the violent 1923 earthquake occurred. With his students, he visited the areas where people gathered after the natural disaster. Through simple yet refined drawings he began to register the temporary shelters and the sparse belongings of the refugees in order to testify their state of living, a condition reduced to the bare minimum.

During his life, Kon Wajiro kept on documenting the memories of Japanese civilisation in an attempt to keep their testimony in the event of their sudden disappearance or of their possible fading due to modernisation. He meticulously traced houses and types of furniture, ways of dressing and commodities, ordinary objects and people’s habit, generating a complex visual taxonomy of the transition of a culture toward modernity.

His studies gave birth to a branch of sociology, called “modernology” which aimed at documenting the evolution of places and cultures as a consequence of modernisation.

http://socks-studio.com/2017/12/10/kon-wajiros-archaeology-of-present-times/

Circus Aedificare

Circus Aedificare is a construction machine that pours a free and unorganized matter around it. The ritual spilling of matter accumulates to the point of constituting an enclosure around it, made of a pure and anarchic accumulation. This absence of constructive economy has for counterpart to obtain an architecture which is exchanged with the field of Painting or Sculpture. In the idea of synthesis of arts, this building succeeded to move the painting dripping method in the field of Architecture. By withdrawing from construction knowledge, it is the density of the material itself that gives shape to the building and its natural distribution.

http://www.marcleschelier.com/circus-aedificare