REFRAIN (IN PERPETUITY) (2020) RETURN TO ART MENU

“I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . .”
– Ozymandias, Percy Shelley

This work was created as a response to several disparate, but overlapping, influences related to the archiving; the seeming permanence; and the ultimate fragility of collective cultural communication.  The first of these was a series of works by the choreographer Alan Parker entitled (an)archival trilogy (2015-2017).  In this series, he questions the impossibility of archiving the live experience – whether this be live art or lived experience.  As an embodied experience before an audience, he suggests that the true way in which these works live on is not in an air-conditioned archive or storage facility but in the memory of the audience, who may again, in their turn, bring the works ‘back to life’ though embodied witnessing.  A second influence was an interest in long-term nuclear waste warning messages, an interdisciplinary field of study involving anthropologists, archaeologists, architects, behavioural scientists, engineers,  linguists, nuclear physicists, philosophers and science fiction writers.  These experts have come together for various design panels to develop a system of communicating the presence of hazardous nuclear waste at deep geological repositories in the US and Europe.  The remit of these design panels was to develop a multifaceted communication system through architecture, symbolism and language which would continue to communicate the same warning message for 10 000 years.

The difficulty of this design endeavour is multiple and is at 10 000 years, perhaps too short given the half-life of Plutonium 239 at 24 000 years.  To place this idea further in historical perspective: the oldest known cave paintings are those in the caves of Maltravieso, Ardales and La Pasiega, Spain.  These red ochre handprints are 64 000 years old and were made by an entirely different human species than ourselves.  What they mean, if anything, is entirely lost other than the statement: we were here.

During 10 000 years in our own knowledge of history, empires rise and fall; languages are lost; signs and symbols change their meaning.  Should we have come across the statue in Shelley’s Ozymandias, we would have no means, over time, to tell (without further investigation) whether it has fallen into ruin or was deliberately designed to demonstrate the power of the atomic bomb.   Our curiosity as a species to excavate and investigate lost temples and decipher stone tablets may render such landscaped warnings with accompanying stone monoliths in dead languages more of an attraction than a dissuasion. A counter-argument to the presence of elaborately designed stone sarcophaguses to designate sites of danger (which may ultimately be read as sites of reverence) has been put forward in the shape of a deliberately induced cultural myth: in the shape of story and song.  A nightmare for children that would give us instinctual pause in the face of specific signs and signifiers.  That diluvian narratives abound in various unconnected cultures worldwide speaks to an understanding and remembrance of a time of flood, whether Noah and his Ark or a giant turtle take the starring role in this mythos. If stone, architecture and language cannot maintain a perpetual singular meaning, is it possible for story to do so? What would we choose to remember and pass on if all that were concrete were lost?