This spring, we’re pleased to share a collaborative programme between the Archaeology–Heritage–Art Research Network and West Dean College. This series of online talks brings together artists, academics, and writers whose work engages with, and at times subverts, the practices, politics, and theories of archaeology, critical heritage studies, contemporary art, and craft.

Our second event welcomes artist and archaeologist Mercedes Baptiste Halliday, and architect and artist and researcher markas fortunatas klisius.

Wednesday 27 May, 17:00 – 18:30 (BST)

Register for the zoom link here

Mercedes Baptiste Halliday is a black british-caribbean artist, archaeologist-anthropologist, currently reading a DPhil in Anthropology at Oxford, where she is doing ethnographic research on Asante Traditional Buildings scattered around the outskirts of Kumasi, Ghana. 

She has previously been artist-in-residence at the Fitzwilliam Museum and UCL East, and has exhibited at the Horniman Museum, the Fitzwilliam Museum, UCL East, Studio Voltaire, and London College of Fashion, and has worked with various cultural organisations, such as the Council for British Archaeology, London Museum, Archaeology South-East, and Royal Museum Greenwich in curatorial, learning and engagement capacities. Mercedes is the founder of BlackArchaeo, an organisation that seeks to centre the health and wellbeing of Black and Brown people through an engagement with archaeology, heritage, art and ecology. She is also a fencing coach on the Muslim Girls Fence project, run by the Muslim social justice organisation Maslaha.

markas fortunatas klisius (they/them) is an anti-disciplinary migrant learner, researcher and dreamer. seeking multiplicities and imaginaries that counterbalance the material and immaterial stratifications of colonialism(s) and its knowledge systems, their practice attempts to capture the spatial, educational and technological parameters of infrastructural and systemic inequality, state violence and environmental transformations.

their collaborative PhD research in partnership with Whitechapel Gallery aims to explore the use of digital technology(s) in shaping concepts of hospitality and communal belonging in an arts institution, defying and unlearning traditional bureaucratic affordances and their material conditions through various place-based cosmologies, spatial experimentations and stewardship practices with cultural technologies. by engaging with decolonial pedagogical traditions, divination systems and challenging the linear temporalities engrained in western technology, this research hopes to harness conceptual and epistemological tools for speculating upon contemporary cultural infrastructures and their relationship with technology, cultivating interoperable lifeforms and equitable modes of being, remembering and interspecies belonging.