Deep Field [Looking Squarely Ahead]
- Submitting institution
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Manchester Metropolitan University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 222602
- Type
- L - Artefact
- Location
- Muzeum Treblinka, Poland
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of production
- August
- Year of production
- 2015
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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B - Art & Performance
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Remembering Holocaust sites requires a plurality of practices to articulate the genealogy of their genocidal infrastructures. Deep Field [Looking Squarely Ahead] engages a new perspective through artistic work with forensic archaeologists, enabling viewers to observe hidden material remains of a Nazi extermination site: the Old Gas Chamber site at Treblinka Camp II in Poland. By miniaturising photographs and data into microfilm, the artwork mimics the condensed deposition of architectural debris, tool fragments and human possessions that were buried when the Camp was abandoned in 1943. The research began in close contact with Centre of Archaeology at Staffordshire University, engaging with their ethical process that uses both contemporary non-invasive, geophysical sensing and traditional excavation methods (Sturdy Colls, 2015). Subsequent studio experimentation tested the layering of microfilm fragments in apparatus that enabled viewers to browse data, and to pull-focus through images of artefacts at different depths in a 1:10 scale representation of a survey trench. The artwork further corroborates eyewitness accounts and reconstructs the site’s story of systematised atrocity. This method of forensic generation re-thinks microfilm’s dominant commercial use as ordered data repository, and forges original territory in media-art practice by re-purposing the medium as creative episteme of photographic fragments. The research contributes to art-science interdisciplinary practice, by collaborating within an enriched dissemination of forensic-science inquiry through a touring exhibition. It is a travelling witness to traumatic events enabling international audiences to ‘find’ evidence that, under halakha, cannot be removed from Jewish graveyards. The research informs museum, education and heritage practice; microfilm can be considered in addition to artefactual, paper and digital records to remember sites, events and communities. This method of imagining the deeper field has the potential to also be applied in encounters that engage communities in re-containing and repairing effects of social violence, through co-creating microfilm archival artworks.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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