Curating Art/Archaeology: Excavating
Through/With Material and Artistic Performativity

The transdisciplinary practice of art/archaeology has created a new relationship between post-processual archaeology and contextual arts, allowing archaeologists and artists to strengthen their investigative and performative work. Curating art/archaeology presents new possibilities for experimenting with the present and the past. The performative gestures in art and archaeology challenge hegemonic perspectives and expand tools for surfacing narratives, presences, and absences. This essay presents an experiment in which curating art/archaeology methodologies were used to (re)interpret the archaeological spatiality, narratives, and artifactual records of the Ovil Mount, a proto-historical village in the northern region of Portugal. Through contemporary art formats and gestures, the static fixation of the past is resignified and mediated in dialogue with the present. The article serves to question the definition of artifact, archaeological objectivity, and the ways we relate to the creation of narratives in the past. It assumes the material and artistic performativity of the site and enacts its immaterialities.

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