![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
We can trace the lines they followed sixteen hundred years ago
I was thrilled to be informed last night of the new mapping of Roman roads, almost doubling the previously known mileage of the mid-second century CE. Naturally it has produced an interactive dataset, Itiner-e. I am waiting for the sea-roads to come online, but in the meantime I could walk from Durovernum to Segontium in about five days, more or less up the A5. Colpeper would flip. The smaller, less paved, less historically continuous routes are even neater, flooded under modern dams or trodden between the constellations of villas. "The roads are anywhere that the Romans walked."
Because it would otherwise have closed before I could see it, for the first time in five years and ten months I made it out to the MFA to see Deep Waters: Four Artists and the Sea, a meditation on marginalization, migration, and the sea as site of simultaneous beauty and atrocity pairing John Singleton Copley's Watson and the Shark (1778) and J. M. W. Turner's Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) (1840) with Ayana V. Jackson's Some People Have Spiritual Eyes I & II (2020) and John Akomfrah's Vertigo Sea (2015). This last is a three-screen video installation subtitled Oblique tales on the aquatic sublime, which turns out to mean a breath-stealing churn of jewel-like navigations from black smokers through kelp forests to polar sheets against which is always playing the human use of the sea as unrenewable dump-site, the extraction of furs and oils and the disposal of bodies including a reenactment of the Zong massacre as if captured in the same grainily archival footage as the foundering vessels of Vietnamese boat people or the winter hunting of bears at Spitsbergen, the floe-slither of seals, the shoal-flick of egrets, the unzipping of a whale aboard a modern factory ship and the head-on gaze of enslaved faces whose humanity has outlasted the scientific racism that commissioned their immortalization by daguerreotype. Periodically one or more of the panels fills with theatrically historical tableaux, seaward figures stranded among a litter of clocks and chairs, bicycles and bones, a pram, a golliwog doll. The aristocratically scarlet-coated, tricorned Black man who surmounts the foreshore like a traveler by Caspar David Friedrich is Olaudah Equiano, enigmatically presiding like the memory of the Middle Passage. The soundtrack similarly interweaves journalism and opera, Nietzsche and Woolf, Melville and Heathcote Williams. It runs 48 minutes and is a hypnotically visceral, gorgeously difficult watch. It doesn't hijack the static art so much as it seems to gather it up, like a great wave. That it is ten years old has outworn none of its urgency on colonialism, immigration, the environment; it hit me much harder than I had imagined and I do not regret it. The waves I grew up with always knock you down.
To my bitter disappointment, I could not get an adequate photo walking home after sunset with only my phone for a camera, but the combination of a local porch-hung pride flag with the action of the wind on its accompanying anatomical model left over from Halloween now produces what I feel would be a respectably Chuck Tingle title: Mooned by the Gay Skeleton.
Because it would otherwise have closed before I could see it, for the first time in five years and ten months I made it out to the MFA to see Deep Waters: Four Artists and the Sea, a meditation on marginalization, migration, and the sea as site of simultaneous beauty and atrocity pairing John Singleton Copley's Watson and the Shark (1778) and J. M. W. Turner's Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) (1840) with Ayana V. Jackson's Some People Have Spiritual Eyes I & II (2020) and John Akomfrah's Vertigo Sea (2015). This last is a three-screen video installation subtitled Oblique tales on the aquatic sublime, which turns out to mean a breath-stealing churn of jewel-like navigations from black smokers through kelp forests to polar sheets against which is always playing the human use of the sea as unrenewable dump-site, the extraction of furs and oils and the disposal of bodies including a reenactment of the Zong massacre as if captured in the same grainily archival footage as the foundering vessels of Vietnamese boat people or the winter hunting of bears at Spitsbergen, the floe-slither of seals, the shoal-flick of egrets, the unzipping of a whale aboard a modern factory ship and the head-on gaze of enslaved faces whose humanity has outlasted the scientific racism that commissioned their immortalization by daguerreotype. Periodically one or more of the panels fills with theatrically historical tableaux, seaward figures stranded among a litter of clocks and chairs, bicycles and bones, a pram, a golliwog doll. The aristocratically scarlet-coated, tricorned Black man who surmounts the foreshore like a traveler by Caspar David Friedrich is Olaudah Equiano, enigmatically presiding like the memory of the Middle Passage. The soundtrack similarly interweaves journalism and opera, Nietzsche and Woolf, Melville and Heathcote Williams. It runs 48 minutes and is a hypnotically visceral, gorgeously difficult watch. It doesn't hijack the static art so much as it seems to gather it up, like a great wave. That it is ten years old has outworn none of its urgency on colonialism, immigration, the environment; it hit me much harder than I had imagined and I do not regret it. The waves I grew up with always knock you down.
To my bitter disappointment, I could not get an adequate photo walking home after sunset with only my phone for a camera, but the combination of a local porch-hung pride flag with the action of the wind on its accompanying anatomical model left over from Halloween now produces what I feel would be a respectably Chuck Tingle title: Mooned by the Gay Skeleton.
no subject
no subject
You're welcome! It was only about two weeks ago that I heard about Viabundus 2, too, so it's been a good stretch for maps.
no subject
no subject
You're welcome. I am glad to have made it.
no subject
no subject
I would too!
no subject
[The film] doesn't hijack the static art so much as it seems to gather it up, like a great wave. I can feel that.
And I heard the Roman roads story on the radio, fantastic! There's a Roman road in Dorset that we drove along when we lived there--very windy. And very straight. And it was easy to imagine slipping into different times as you walked along it.
no subject
You're welcome! "Powerful" has been somewhat denatured as a descriptor for art, but I found it beautiful, upsetting, and effective.
And I heard the Roman roads story on the radio, fantastic! There's a Roman road in Dorset that we drove along when we lived there--very windy. And very straight. And it was easy to imagine slipping into different times as you walked along it.
I bet you could have. I remember seeing an aqueduct from the bus my first time in England and being thrilled.
no subject
(I wonder could a person do an interactive dataset of couriers' routes through occupied territories, for instance, if one had primary text for plotty purposes and a couple of period maps for "NO HIGHWAY JUST MOOCOWS.")
no subject
Everyone can walk the past!
(I wonder could a person do an interactive dataset of couriers' routes through occupied territories, for instance, if one had primary text for plotty purposes and a couple of period maps for "NO HIGHWAY JUST MOOCOWS.")
(I don't see why it couldn't be done.)
no subject
I'm glad you got out to see the exhibit and that it was so very worth it! <3
but the combination of a local porch-hung pride flag with the action of the wind on its accompanying anatomical model left over from Halloween now produces what I feel would be a respectably Chuck Tingle title: Mooned by the Gay Skeleton.
lol!
no subject
If it makes you feel better, we haven't got one, either.
I'm glad you got out to see the exhibit and that it was so very worth it!
Thank you! I am, too. I hadn't been inside a museum since before the pandemic, full stop.
lol!
I am just hoping no one notices and turns it back around before I can get a decent picture.
no subject
Oh, I was just pleased my assumptions were correct!
no subject
And if we had one, we'd have either a major archaeological discovery or a serious break in space-time.
(I am glad you had read your local landscape correctly.)
no subject
no subject
I think it's very nice that you live on the same one! Makes you easy to find.
no subject
no subject
I had heard of the Akomfrah through seeing his Afrofuturist documentary The Last Angel of History (1996), but knew very little about it otherwise. I was not familiar with Jackson's photography at all. I don't know if it's a traveling exhibit because the Copley and the Turner are both part of the permanent collections of the MFA, but if anything like it comes near you, I obviously really recommend it. (I was glad to see the Turner showcased because there was a time in my childhood when it was peculiarly difficult to find in the museum, which seemed somewhat deliberately against the point.)
no subject
Colpeper would flip.
:D
no subject
That's excellent. I can see the Romans going for roundabouts. It's not like they didn't have wheeled traffic, too.
no subject
no subject
Yes! The way people wear on a land like water: whatever's the easiest track.