Shadowtime: 37°59'34.58"N, 27°11'50.26"E

Shadowtime manifests as a feeling of living in two distinctly different temporal scales simultaneously, or acute consciousness of the possibility that the near future will be drastically different than the present. (Bureau of Linguistical Reality). Whereas history is typically described as a succession of events in a linear relationship of distance relative to the present, theories of the Anthropocene initiate a recalibration of how we think time and its relation to matter. These temporality structures are not composed of discrete or bounded parts, but are necessarily incomplete and “leak into one another” (Morton) with events from previous geologic eras continuing to play out today. An archaeological site is locus of temporal conundrums and contradictions.


Shadowtime 37°59’31.70”N, 27°11’36.65”E assembles mappings and videos of a promontory on the Aegean coast of Turkey where the remains of a 2nd century BC city are being studied by archaeologists. In parallel, we undertake a documentary project of the chronotopes of the site for Video footage brings into focus some of the site’s coincident material timescales—the slow timescale of geology, stones and clays on the site comingled with the much more accelerated one of its current life forms. This is not only a visual installation that we develop but an aural one as well, with the cyclical score of cicadas, birds, wind, and sea rising and falling. A deep, layered drawing is constructed and shown alongside the videos. Between acrylic layers etched with the topography of the site are suspended ancient, current and proposed site maps; images of the cisterns and other fragmented objects found on the site; the migratory paths of birds, the sun, and survey drones; images of the cicadas, snakes, and sheep that now inhabit the city. The work aims to elicit an attunement to the landscape that re-positions human and nonhuman entities into interacting relational fields where hierarchies begin to be flattened. Within our body of work, this project continues a trajectory of “world-building” through practices of combinatory and thick mapping. This body of work informs our collaboration with archeologists in the design of the future of the site at Notion; envisioned as a park where both archaeology and ecology are encountered simultaneously and non- hierarchically by visitors.

Team

RVTR: Geoffrey Thün and Kathy Velikov with Karen Toomasian, Dan Tish, Andrew Kremers, Travis Crabtree, Lauren Lahr