Liquid Antiquity, with Brooke Holmes
Abstract
When we imagine the curation of antiquities, especially classical antiquities, we usually think of preserving the past within museums and other cultural institutions. But we rarely ask what we are preserving, and why, and for whom. The language of the classical has value built into it, so what would it mean to take our relationship with ‘classical’ antiquity as itself an object of curation? And in rethinking how communities have taken shape around the valuation of antiquity, how might we recognise and sustain new communities around the critical and creative engagement with the ancient Greco-Roman world? In this episode, Shivaike Shah speaks to Professor Brooke Holmes of Princeton University about the exhibition project Liquid Antiquity, on which she collaborated with Polina Kosmadaki and Yorgos Tzirtzilakis for the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art in 2017. Shivaike and Brooke discuss the exhibition’s driving questions and examine the fundamental issue of how we may relate to a past that, by its nature, does not survive.
Bibliography
open-source
Brooke Holmes & Nida Ghouse, ‘Coming to Know’, digital discourse programme for ‘A Slightly Curving Place’, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2020)
Brooke Holmes & Isabel Lewis, ‘Embodied Presence: Isabel Lewis Interviewed by Brooke Holmes’, BOMB (2019)
Brooke Holmes & Allyson Vieira, ‘Building a Transhistorical We: Allyson Vieira in Conversation with Brooke Holmes’, X-TRA 22.2 (2019)
paywalled
Paul Chan, ‘A Time Apart’, in George Baker & Eric Banks (eds.), Paul Chan: Selected Writings 2000-2014 (New York: Badlands Unlimited & Foundation Laurenz Schaulager, 2014)
Paul Chan, Richard Fletcher & Sarah Rudin, Hippias Minor or The Art of Cunning (New York: Badlands Unlimited & DESTE, 2015)
Nida Ghouse (ed.), An Archaeology of Listening: A Slightly Curving Place (Berlin: Archive Books, 2022)
Nida Ghouse & Brooke Holmes (eds.), Coming to Know (Berlin: Archive Books, 2022)
Brooke Holmes & Karen Marta (eds.), Liquid Antiquity (Nea Ionia: DESTE, 2017)
Brooke Holmes, ‘At the End of the Line: On Kairological History’, Classical Reception Journal 12.1 (2020), 62-90
Christodoulous Panayioutou, Two Days after Forever: A Reader on the Choreography of Time (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2015)
J. I. Porter, ‘What is “Classical” about Classical Antiquity?’, in J. I. Porter (ed.), Classical Pasts: The Classical Traditions of Greece and Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006)
The Postclassicisms Collective, Postclassicisms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020)
Michael Squire, James Cahill & Ruth Allen, The Classical Now (Buckinghamshire: Elephant Publishing, 2018)
Transcript
You can find a full transcript of the episode here.