Site-integrity is a working methodology – a particular but original mode of site-specific practice that potentiates a dynamic exchange between site, artist, device, and community. Artistic devices articulate the material, architectural, social, religious, institutional discourses present in site acting as an interface, a dynamic network or system of exchange. In site-integrity place is apparatus, in each specific site the recording device operates in a distinctly different manner providing different techniques and outcomes in each site. This methodology offers a collaborative approach to fieldwork, transforming the traditional anthropological ‘subject of research’ into the producer of its own voice. This egalitarian approach to art making encourages reflexive conversations that avoid reductive ethnographic portraits of ‘subjects’ and fixed representation.
The personal, aesthetic, and everyday cultures of place and community are often museumized, subjected to the disciplinary gaze of Western art historians and anthropologists. Site-integrity repositions this act of representation from its retrospective or projective dimensions towards that which is experiential and encountered within the context of the place and its people. Taking a non-representational position (Bolt, 2004) this research sees “place as emergent, relational and beyond representational regimes” (Massey, 2005), implicitly performing involvements in, as opposed to observations on, site.
Site-integrity:
- responds to the material, architectural, social and institutional discourses present in site
- conducts fieldwork in collaboration with and for a site-specific community
- performs place through artistic devices operating in spatial / temporal relations with site
- repositions the act of representation towards that which is encountered / experienced in site
keywords: site, community, performance, site specific, architecture, representation, cultural heritage, archive.