2021 Summer Issue - ReBuilding 2

Creative note: For the collage-based graphic above, designer Jocelyn Lau was inspired by the diverse textures and colors of images and materials featured in this issue.

Our offerings in Summer 2021 for ReBuilding 2 continue our themes from ReBuilding in Spring 2021, relating processes of damage and restoration, loss and healing, and the never-ending making and doing of things that are fundamental to living. In light of the pandemic, and historical and socio-cultural issues that long pre-dated 2020, dynamics of ‘building and rebuilding’ are in even more urgent need of consideration. Through the articles, interviews and essays in this issue we are collectively called upon to reflect on what it is to live through and cope with these times. What will we make of the ‘new’ awareness of our mutual entanglement and co-construction of this world? How will we relate to other people and environments, and incorporate others into our projects of re-building in ways that stress multi-vocality and co-existence?

The diverse authors in this issue cover a lot of ground both in terms of the intellectual issues they invoke, the regions where they site their study, and the mundane but, nevertheless, central role of materials, objects, bodies and experiences on which their arguments rely. Communities feature as essential connective tissue, and people respond to loss and damage with visceral actions of protesting, healing, creating and resisting. In their insights, these are articles that not only offer us scholarly and artistic ideas but indicate possibilities of how to live and go forth into this world.

Tubs used to wash pottery. Olynthos, Greece, 2019. Photo by Nadhira Hill.

Nadhira Hill offers a thought-provoking opinion piece, Archaeology’s Destructive Legacy: Burning it All Down to Better Support Scholars of Color, where she examines the ways in which (Classical) archaeology’s inherently destructive nature is deeply intertwined with and informed by its destructive foundations. Hill says “Despite the traditional prevalence of white scholars in our syllabi, in our conference panels, and in our institutions, archaeologists of color have made it exceedingly clear in the last several months that this is our discipline, too. However, staking a claim in a discipline founded on ableist, masculinist, and white supremacist ideologies has not been without its challenges. Recent and oft-repeated calls for “burning it all down” has led not only to incidents of “punching down” from tenured professors at (often precarious) students on social media, but also to often misguided attempts to diversify departments and classrooms which in actuality perpetuate the structural racism we are trying to dismantle. By juxtaposing the destructive natures of both archaeological method and the discipline at large, I suggest how professors can apply principles of archaeological fieldwork to their mentorship of students of color.”

In our second offering, we interview Sophie Bjork-James about her latest book “The Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism’s Politics of the Family” (Rutgers University Press, 2021). This book provides an ethnographic account of how a theology of the family came to dominate a white evangelical tradition in the post-Civil Rights movement United States, providing a theological corollary to Religious Right politics. As Bjork-James explains there are new things happening in terms of young Evangelical’s consciousness. They are articulating a more global politics rooted in social justice. It is still rooted in conservative Christian faith but a very different framework than the religious right politics which is very much attached to Christian nationalism and American exceptionalism. However, with Evangelicalism becoming even more extreme in some ways, she cautions that we need to think more about how we can talk about racial inequality, racism as well as LGBTQ issues, that is, as moral issues and as rights of people to their own livelihoods and lives, even if those are different than what we understand. Inequality is actually a moral issue.

Kantha cloths of Bengal, historically used as coverlets for babies and children, were deliberately soft, warm, and comforting against the skin. In the museum environment, such textiles are protected by glass, forbidding touch. Reproductions could help visitors better appreciate the meaning and associations these cloths had in their former ‘lives’. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK. Photo by Emily Levick.

In Handling Textiles: Rebuilding Object Lives in Museums, Emily Levick turns our attention to the issue of objects in museums. She focuses on textiles as exemplary social and cultural "‘second skins’ and explores how these fragments from Others can be better reconstructed and contextualized in western museums. Among the oldest technologies in the world, textiles are also among the most accessible, due in part to their highly tactile nature and sheer ubiquity. As such, they are ideal media for museums attempting to widen their audience reach and more effectively represent world history and culture. Employing textiles as catalysts for deeper engagement with visitors and potential visitors, museums can become more relevant, helping to remove the perceived barriers of ‘elitism’. Yet, how can visitors understand the meanings and values of textiles that are displayed in environments so far removed from their original contexts? How can museums rebuild the stories and lives of textiles in exhibits?

Hanging on by a Thread/Coming Apart at the Seams. Dissolved flag. Artist: Winnie van der Rijn. 2020.

Textiles feature again in Damage as Opportunity: The Art of Winnie Van Der Rijn, where the artist explores themes of damage, deconstruction, remaking, and catharsis through various bodies of work. Van der Rijn is a self-described artist of opportunity, collecting materials, experimenting with techniques and pursuing her curiosities. Her art practice includes textiles, sculpture, collage and collaboration which she considers its own art form. Born a maker, the last few years have seen the artist responding to events in the U.S. through the qualities and properties of fabric and assorted materials. Damage is an invitation to discover new possibilities and it is an opporunity for transformative flux, liquification and fluidity. Van der Rijn’s work deals with dissolving and dissolution as physical processes and there are strong spiritual themes of ritual cleansing, washing away, release, discovery, distilling to the essence, uncovering and catharsis.

In Transformations on the Margin: Jack Smith’s Vital and Difficult Art, an article by Sanya Osha, we learn about the life and work of Jack Smith, visionary American filmmaker, photographer and avant-garde performance artist who was born in 1932 and died of a HIV/Aids related illness in 1989. This piece bears themes of spirituality and transcendence through Smith’s ability to get his co-travelers to believe in the transformative dimensions of his singular art events. Smith’s films were transmogrifying works that adopted lowly, discarded film materials, in other words trash, marginal people and seemingly marginal subjects, with almost incredible results. Devoid of crass materialism and virtually no form of mainstream support, the journey and experience were essentially edifying and often life changing. Smith demonstrated that a condition of absolute lack is not necessarily to be equated with inadequacy. An ostensibly deprived state can in fact be inspiring occasion to reconsider the meaning of art and the role of the artist.

Our last article is a peer-reviewed piece by Chairat Polmuk entitled, Wounded Landscapes: Debris of War, Residual Vulnerability, and (Toxic) Intimacy in Post-Cold War Southeast Asia. This article investigates transnational ecologies of the vestiges of war in Southeast Asia, where a shared experience of vulnerability has become the very condition of everyday reality and aesthetic expression. Focusing on the legacies of the U.S. bombardment campaigns in Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand during the Second Indochina War, Polmuk looks at how artists and filmmakers such as Allan Sekula (USA), Tada Hengsapkul (Thailand) Vandy Rattana (Cambodia), and Xaisongkham Induangchanthy (Laos), document the lingering effects—and affects—of Cold War atrocities through topographic aesthetics. These artists and filmmakers transform the wounded landscape into a locus of “residual vulnerability,” a corporeal and environmental exposure to explosive remnants of war that allow for artistic articulations of toxic—injurious yet constitutive—forms of intimacy and agency.

In all these pieces, ideas that have remained silent (so far) or are emergent and amplified multi-vocally, dynamics of damage and destruction, building and interpretation, take place simultaneously or in succession. Sometimes these are searched out and identified as opportunities, used as catalysts or lie dormant waiting to be revealed by the forces of time and space. If “Damage is a turning point - inviting response” as artist Winnie van der Rijn embodies in her work, the past year has shown us that our agency and future is very much tied up in how we choose to respond.