Paper short abstract:

How do mixed-media installations work as experimental explorations of material spaces, in time? This presentation considers this question with reference to current debates and practices in anthropology, art, and museum exhibiting.

Paper long abstract:

How do mixed-media installations work as experimental explorations of material spaces, in time? This presentation considers this question with reference to current debates and practices in anthropology, art, and museum exhibiting.

Retrospective analysis and partial re-display of a collaborative project, 'Rooms experiment: a fast installation', curated by Hallam at a vacated school of anatomy in northern Scotland, provides a focus for discussion of installations as productive in developing a flexible and responsive way of doing anthropology. With a DIY ethos, this experiment was designed and carried out as a site-specific work concerned with the ongoing life of rooms that had been locked and left 'unused' for years.

The installation developed as a spatially distributed series of digital projections, sketches, and sound recordings that captured and manipulated spaces assumed to be dormant or 'empty'. By examining material, visual, and auditory traces of human and non-human activity (e.g. of plants and birds), the four-day project revealed and interpreted dynamic, not static, spaces. Aspects of inaccessible rooms were made visible and audible, enlarged and amplified through the installation that attended to texture, light, colour, temperature, mood and sensation. Here were growth and resilience as well as decomposition and disintegration.

Drawing on strategies of surrealists, contemporary artists, and curators, the paper asks how method and theory might be developed through installation practice as an experimental mode of anthropology - in this instance it enabled investigation of material, sensory and temporal dimensions of spaces that are changing/moving even though seemingly suspended or 'out of action'.