Art & Archaeology: Uncomfortable Archival Landscapes

This paper conceptualises practice in the space between and beyond Art & Archaeology as a zone where disciplinary certainties and known practices are unsettled, expanded and re‐cast. We will outline our current thinking about heritage landscapes as places and temporalities for engagement in the practice of what Henk Slager calls the para‐archive. For us, landscape functions as a kind of living archive, however, following Jacques Derrida, we are sceptical of the privileged relation between archive, law and authority. Therefore, in this paper we will think through our interdisciplinary research in the context of the development of creative para‐archives, which facilitate new, affective ways of thinking and making by bringing together the previously unimagined. Responding to the challenge of the SARS‐CoV‐2 discomfort zone, we seek to surface creative practices, activate archival disruptions and expand pedagogical approaches to the articulation of uncomfortable archival landscapes. The pandemic has brought into sharp focus the need to re‐conceptualise visions of space, experiences of place and archival practices. During a virtual fieldtrip students accessed a range of materials from Scotland’s National Record of the Historic Environment. We aimed to enable the co‐design and co‐production of a virtual fieldtrip, followed by discussions about our collective conceptualisations of landscapes of discomfort. The archaeological fieldwork in the virtual realm provides a context for students to engage in desirology as a catalyst for deranging, re‐associating and re‐imagining the archive in creative ways.