site_seal_gesture
SSG (site_seal_gesture) is a collaboration between Lia Wei and Rupert Griffiths: one is an archaeologist, the other a cultural geographer; both are artists with an architectural background. Wei and Griffiths treat their SSG work as a speculative genre or speculative tunneling, using their creative practice to dig beneath the ground between disciplines. Working together as artists gives Wei and Griffiths a common “undisciplined” ground through which to engage with their own and each other’s academic disciplines. Equally, it allows them to be attentive to landscape in unfamiliar ways, to become strangers in their own land.
SSG is a creative, speculative space that takes Wei and Griffiths’ respective disciplines as a palette or toolbox of ideas through which to create in the undisciplined ground of creative practice. Undisciplined because they consider it unconstrained by disciplinary discourse. This has become fertile ground for thinking about the value and difficulties of cross-disciplinary collaboration, and how it can be used to investigate and challenge the methodological and epistemic intentions of archaeological and geographic fieldwork, as well as to ask questions about its audiences and its outputs.
Wei and Griffiths’ collaborative work over the past three years has engaged with architectural ruins in rural margins, specifically abandoned military sites in the UK and rock-cut burial sites in China. They began with long-distance conversations, sketch dialogues, and exchanges about their respective academic fieldwork in London’s periphery and at Second Century rock-cut sites on the Upper Yangzi River, Southwest China. Next, they moved on to abandoned military defenses and sound mirrors along the south east coast of the UK, and then to the creation of artifacts, cast or carved, that made links between sites and continents.
Wei and Griffiths then traveled to Chongqing, Southwest China, bringing SSG into direct contact with archaeological fieldwork, in parallel to an exercise in experimental archaeology. Here they created two replicas of second century rock-cut tombs in a heritage park, working with a duo of stonemasons and local cultural authorities. Returning to the UK, SSG reinterpreted the experiment, creating a short-lived ruin of full-size fragments of a recessed entrance in chalk boulders that had fallen from the white cliffs of Broadstairs on the Kent coast.
For more information, check out these links and publications:
https://www.liawei.org/site_seal_gesture
