In the heart of the old town, on the Théodelinde esplanade, a new cultural space dedicated to Genevan archaeology is opening its doors. At the crossroads between a museum site and the cultural scene, the Site Archéologique Saint-Antoine (SaSA) invites visitors to rethink the relationship between heritage conservation and its promotion. For its opening SaSA invited MAMCO to propose a specific intervention by artists. The choice fell on Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige and more precisely on their series of works related to archeology.
Artists and filmmakers Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige (both born in 1969 in Beirut) have elaborated over the last decades a multimedia, research-based practice that confronts the inescapable course of the real and the emancipatory strength of image-making, fiction, and poetry. With their Palimpsests, Time Capsules, and Trilogies, exhibited at SaSA, they pursue their investigation into storytelling and the ways visual art give significance to realities that have long remained out of sight. Drawing on geological methodologies and collaborations with practitioners of rescue archaeology, the artists propose representations challenging the writing of history, the visuality of the invisible, and the vertigo induced by deep time. They state: “this body of works explores the invisible remains of cities buried beneath our contemporary towns, testifying to the impact of human presence on Earth and its traces. It is about shifts in scale and time, uncovering, recycling, and covering over again, and how manmade violence and climatic disruptions affect possible narratives.”
Each work highlights a specific facet of their inquiry into subterranean worlds, through residues collected from sites in France, Greece, and Lebanon. Palimpsests records the visual fascination generated by acts of drilling, excavation, and construction. A scopic drift, the film combines drone footage and microscopic images, wide shots and close-ups, rapid edits, and long sequences to offer a vision of time that is both concrete and fantastical. Time Capsules proposes a visualization of history as a process of stratification, through the composition of uncovered core samples (rock, clay, artifacts, etc.). Here the artists devise a way to preserve and sculpt remnants that would otherwise been discarded. In the Trilogies, the notion of timeline is reconsidered through parallel possible narratives and various forms of representation (photography, drawing, text).
With their works dealing with archeology, Hadjithomas & Joreige unveils underground messengers and buried images to question where we stand within an ongoing cycle of ruptures, continuities and discontinuities, catastrophe, and regeneration.
- The exhibition is curated by Lionel Bovier
