Methods of patternmaking [Lepenski Vir]

The first chapter of a longer work in progress

June 2021
Artist: Nina Torp


Rachel Wither and Nina Torp discuss Methods of patternmaking [Lepenski Vir]

Rachel Withers: Nina, thank you for sharing Methods of Pattern Making [Lepenski Vir] with us. This introduced me to the Lepenski Vir Museum in Serbia, an intriguing structure which contains the archaeological remains of one of the world’s earliest towns. I knew nothing about Lepenski Vir before, so thank you for that too! Firstly, can I ask you about the status of this work, which feels to me like a kind of experiment or work in progress, rather than a finished statement; am I right? Can you also say more about how it relates to your wider working processes?

Nina Torp: Methods of Pattern Making [Lepenski Vir] is a chapter of a longer film that I'm in the process of making. The film will bring together videos made in various prehistoric sites, all of them representing some of the world’s earliest known architectures. The work is still in progress, so you will have to wait and see what else it contains, besides Lepenski Vir! In each chapter, video is used to explore each site’s architectural remains – both the structures of individual early dwellings, and the ways the findings are configured in relation to one another. 

I have worked extensively with archaeology since 2008, and since 2015 with archaeologists in various sites in Norway and elsewhere, so the Covid-19 lockdown imposed significant constraints. I responded by “travelling” into my hard drive and extracting source material from my research archive. Photography and film are among my habitual tools, so in that sense this work is characteristic. However, I normally usually use film or video in the context of installation, so it is usually deployed in a place-sensitive or site-specific fashion, in relation to a physical space and a combination of other objects that may be pre-existing or made by me. In contrast, this work is designed to be looked at online on a screen or phone, and so I aimed towards a kind of presentation that has an instant appeal. I tried to ‘dive into’ the work and lose a bit of control – to make something concise that would quickly capture the attention of an online audience.

RW: In the video, the museum’s glass-roofed structure looks quite spectacular and the remains within it seem strangely clean and artificial. The location feels like a movie set, or some synthetic vision of the archaeology and museology of the future. It’s not easy to read, straight away, what it is one is looking at; what the status of this place is. Can you say more about it, and why you chose to visit and document it?

NT: The background to this lies in work I’ve done with the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, and my investigation of various excavations of prehistoric settlements in Norway. Between 2015-18 I undertook a long-term project called SITUATIONS, a collaboration with a team of archaeologists working on the construction site of a new motorway in southern Norway. I heard a lot about Lepenski Vir from them, and got to visit in 2019. 

The Lepenski Vir museum is located on the banks of the Danube and contains the remains of early monumental sculptures and trapezoidal structures – the foundations of dwellings – from Mesolithic times, 9500-6500 BC, which were uncovered in the 1960s. However, it’s actually a reconstruction of the excavation site: the remains were relocated around 1970 due to the construction of a dam, and the original site is now under water. The reconstruction is about 100 meters further up the river, and 30 meters higher up than the original excavation. In 2011, the remains were roofed over and contained within a new museum. 

So, yes, you’re right – this is an intriguing place, a conglomerate of times. Perhaps we can think of the museum as a “stratigraphic profile” in itself. Instead of solely displaying artifacts, which is more common for a museum of cultural history, we see a total replica of the archaeological site. It’s not usually possible to visit excavations in progress and archaeological digs normally get covered over once they are finished, so in that sense the replica serves a useful purpose; it openly communicates past, present and future to the public via its mix of original and copied artifacts. 

At the same time, as you say, it’s hard to work out which objects and features are genuine and which are copies or importations, and so this place challenges our idea of ​​the real in the presentation of cultural heritage. I am interested in how history is not solely revealed but created through the production of texts and the displaying of objects in museums. The presentation and understanding of history is always framed by our own time and culture, and because we live in a world where everything is constantly changing, the presentation and understanding of history changes with it. This place represents this in diverse ways. In popular science’s dissemination of archaeology, artifacts and cultural heritage are often presented as ‘pure’ and ‘real’, but it’s clear that the reality claims made by this museum are relative and complicated. National affiliations also inflect the presentation of archaeology and can induce institutions to frame their artefacts as ‘the world’s first…’ or ‘the world’s greatest…’ and so on. Among archaeologists, though, it is a common understanding that technology and practices spread following the travel patterns of humans in prehistory. Cultures mixed and technologies got passed on and adapted, so the idea of a location as the ‘world’s first…’ potentially says more about the culture making the claim than the site the claim is related to. 

RW: The video opens with glimpses of school children who are apparently on a school visit, plus ambient sounds and music that suggest a sense of anticipation. I found myself transported back to that situation – to a pervasive feeling of excitement that is not really to do with a deep understanding of where one is or what one is looking at, but about doing something out of the ordinary, being in an unfamiliar new place… that inchoate excitement colours the film and adds to the pregnant sense of dislocation that we’ve been discussing.

NT: The school children showed up while I was filming and their interactions with the architecture were an unexpected gift. The children don’t relate to the place as something precious or exalted; they run around and slide down the stairs, taking it in physically, not intellectually. They add a kind of joy and buzz to the video and widen its scope onto archaeology in its entirety: on how it is encountered in, and becomes meaningful in, many different ways, as I’ve learned from working with schools on educational projects linking archaeology and artistic exploration. 

Archaeological institutions face various dilemmas: how pedagogical should the presentation of prehistory be? How should museums convey history to the public? At Lepenski Vir, the school children are seeing a replica of what an excavation site looks like after the digging process is finished, plus the actual objects that were found there, set in a reconstructed relation to each other. The children’s presence invites us to ask whether we can more fully understand material such as this through an embodied encounter with it. By physically experiencing the scale and quantity of the dwellings, it’s arguably easier to imagine what it was like to live there. So, although it is essentially a reconstruction, the museum aims to give a very broad sense of context. I am strongly interested in how we acquire knowledge about the past and what kind of mechanisms we use to preserve it, and the interventions that I’ve made into the video footage are intended to add an additional dimension to its probing of archaeological thought, process and presentation. 

RW: Yes, I need to ask you about this too. Your video overlays the reconstructed site with enigmatic patterns that partially obscure its artefacts and geometries. Can you say more about this content, and how it is designed to complement, or re-orient, our reading of the original video footage – both formally, and in terms of interpreting what we see?

NT: Through long-term research and diverse collaborations with museums and archaeological projects, I’ve learned a great deal about the development of archaeological methods of excavation and its impact on the writing of history. In this video there is a particular focus on the formation of geometric shapes in fieldwork, and I connect this to my own field, art. The video layers, covers and uncovers structures in ways that reference and interweave archaeological methodology with forms taken from the history of art and architecture. Guiding this is the recognition that archaeological thought and process are products of scientific thought and modernity. The archaeological excavation methods that are used today originated in the late 19th century, as a consequence of the development of modernity. Archaeologists dig following a grid pattern that is overlaid onto the landscape of each site. This enables a systematic, square-by-square examination of the earth with coordinates for each square.

This process is scientifically justified, but over time it has also become a cultural framework. The geometric shapes that you see in the video meld excavation maps, the grids and systems of archaeological methodology, with geometric shapes taken from specific sources that represent the beginnings of modernist art and architecture. These include Suprematist compositions from sources such as Malevich, and architectural plans relating to the Katsura Imperial Villa by Kobori Enshu. Built in Kyoto in the 17th century, the Katsura Imperial Villa was visited by Bruno Taut in the 1930s and later on by Le Corbusier, and it forms an important point of reference in Western modernist architecture. Malevich was concerned with planes of geometric shapes and figures – with the idea of a ‘grammar’ based on fundamental geometric forms. His pursuit of the ‘non-objective’ can be seen as a kind of attempt to gain dominion over nature. There is an architectonic dimension to his work, and some of his paintings and sculptures are also reminiscent of the geometric formations that appear on excavation maps of archaeological excavations.

These diverse but related forms appear across the video footage as spatial patterns that both obscure the view of the “original” prehistoric site and also frame and highlight elements within the footage. They are metaphors for our way of looking at the world, but they also serve to stage and foreground the idea of historical process. They are designed to accentuate blind spots in the archaeological space and to remind the viewer how we understand the past in the light of our own time. New data are discovered, new connections are revealed and new analyses come as a consequence of this. Artifacts we have a specific understanding of, can all of a sudden have an expanded and changed context. Archaeology is fascinating not least because it is a field that is always in flux. 

So, the thinking behind this work (and my work in general) is strongly interdisciplinary. It is intended to cast light on the mindsets and the excavation methods behind the objects on display at this museum, and in archaeology more generally. Viewers are invited to reflect on the formal and ideological similarities and links between cultural and scientific practices. Scientific archaeological excavation methods both discover and create ancient history, and institutions of knowledge play a pivotal role in determining cultural history collections’ methods of display and constructions of history. Art is uniquely placed to help reveal their agency and to invite audiences to reflect on and relativise the pictures of the past that they encounter in museums.  

Please watch in full screen

Nina Torp is an artist living in Oslo and Berlin. Her interdisciplinary practice draws on the ideas and practices of archaeology architecture and museology, and foregrounds issues of collective memory and the perception and presentation of cultural history.

She studied at the Royal College of Art, London, Kent Institute of Art & Design, Maidstone and the École des Beaux-Arts in Toulouse. From 2015 to 2018 she ran the interdisciplinary project SITUATIONS at Oslo's Museum of Cultural History, working with archaeologists, researchers and museum staff and visitors. Her work is often site-specific and has included projects located at Karl-Marx-Allee in Berlin, and Carl Berner underground station in Oslo, plus a number of European archaeological excavation sites. She has recently exhibited at the Museum of Cultural History, the Vigeland Museum, Gallery ROM, Tenthaus, the Norwegian Sculptors Society and QB Gallery in Oslo, the North Norwegian Art Centre in the Lofoten archipelago, Rogaland Art Centre in Stavanger, and Scotty and Galerie im Turm in Berlin. Upcoming projects include a large-scale work for Oslo Sculpture Triennal and a residency at The Watch in Berlin. She currently holds a three year working grant from the Norwegian Government. www.ninatorp.com


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