These field work documents are gathered during our Interpretive Field Projects (IFP), journeys to foreign sites that jumpstart new ICI research topics. With few plans other than a starting location, a string of confluent events and ‘travel guides’ chart the rest of the journey yielding a wealth of uncontextualized raw material for the ICI repository. The interpretive aspect of the IFP occurs once we have returned home and often after a large gap of time. Past IFPs have included: The Origins of Madness (Vienna, Buttenhausen, Gugging, Salzburg); It Takes Two Traumas to Make a Trauma (Auschwitz, Berlin, Amsterdam); Cults (Graceland, Carlsbad, Tinkertown, Bibleland); Searching for Sebald (East Anglia, London, The Hague) and An Inconvenient Camera (Gränna, Sweden; London and Berkeley).
Title: The Gates of Hell in Turkmenistan” Description: A hole in the earth that has burned continuously since 1971. In that year a group of geologists accidentally tapped into a deposit of natural gas. A hole quickly developed as the methane gas escaped from the … Continue readingEPHEMERA KABINETT: Gates of Hell
Saussure tells us that no sign makes sense on its own but only in relation to other signs. The value of a sign is determined by the relationship between signs in the system as a whole. He notes the French word mouton could be translated … Continue readingChanged Priorities
This is a nondescript sign on a back road of East Anglia, England. But to anyone who has read W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, this sign might (and it does) announce the site of Alec Girrard’s model of the Temple of Jerusalem. Each … Continue readingTo the Temple
The main entrance of the Great Eastern Hotel in London offers a ‘sign’ that is hidden in plain sight. Even though it was left off the hotel’s official floorplan, three bricked in windows act as a visual sign for a Freemason’s temple built into the … Continue readingThe Sign of the Masons
This permanent memorial at Chimayo, New Mexico evokes the language of the roadside shrine. The permanence of the ceramic calla lilies is undermined by a thin sheet of cellophane wrapped around the bouquet. Its haphazard embrace borrows the language of temporary memorials, those placeholders for … Continue readingFlowers at Chimayo
A small plaque on the side of the Great Eastern Hotel in London marks the site of the old Bethlehem Hospital. The sign obscures the other name for the site. As W. G. Sebald schooled us in Austerlitz, at this same place, “the insane and … Continue readingThis is Bedlam
The Greek word for ‘sign’ is sema, which is also the word for ‘grave.’ For the Greeks the grave was the ur-sign of signification for it ‘stood for’ what it ‘stood in.’ The sema points to something only present through its sign. For Adolf Loos, … Continue readingThe Ur-Sign: a graveyard in East Anglia
