Archaeological excavation as performance:
dissolving boundaries between art and science for the sake of knowledge
Knowledge is not quantifiable or stable. It is embodied competence, everything that allows us to perform daily life and to keep ourselves as having a certain joy in our existence: it is in a process of constant transformation and unfolding. The forces that drive us into it could be called desire. We want to know, to understand more clearly, because we have the fantasy of explaining it all, with the power associated to that imagined state of fulfilment, which is unattainable by definition.
Archaeological knowledge is the conventional expression that we use to embrace the whole world around us, to which we belong, and where we detect traces of so to speak past performances.
Actually, these traces are everywhere, and ultimately they overlap our entire environment, our field of perception and action. So they are not so much traces of dead actions or people, but “present absences” like everything else. In fact, every object of our attention, be it a stone or a person, immediately after being framed, obscures its surroundings and creates its own “deep core” of inaccessibility. This is why the French philosopher and psychoanalyst J. Lacan spoke of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary as a triadic device to understand what we people are and how we perform, feel and think. It is probably a useful scheme, as many others, in the sense that it helps us to access the complexity of human action and motivations, not only the most visible, recognizable ones, but also the rest: and the “rest” could be compared to the submerged part of an iceberg. So as long as we try to understand what is “our business” as archaeologists, we need to improve our self-knowledge as persons; both things are one and the same.
An archaeological excavation is a theatre of tasks (a “taskscape” - Ingold) and hence a stage of interactions in a place often full of “traces” of former interactions. The reasons for what we are doing will be richer if the entire person - and not only just an external, abstract observer - coalesces into that action. A cold observer produces dead things. What we need is an engaged subject, capable or moving into the site all his/her experience, dissolving the traditional procedure of science into the movement of art, and vice-versa. In that sense, our embodied conscience as performers among other performers helps a lot. To make my point clearer, I will comment on some images of my own experience as a field archaeologist.
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