Shipwreck Hauntography - Sightations Cafe (original) (raw)

Like ghosts in a flooded and forgotten storm cellar, shipwreck realities are so far removed from our own that they exist in a kind of ontological void, where the lack of a sense of presence leads to a lack of perceived being – in Derridian terms, a hauntology (his pun on ‘ontology’). In this respect, a hauntograph would address that phantasmal tension in space between public and private that bears directly on audience/artist/archaeologist interpretation, and it is this illusory place where the new project Shipwreck Hauntography focuses its efforts. My first two attempts at creating hauntographs have as their subject matter the Yarmouth Roads Protected Shipwreck, where I have overseen excavations in 2015-2016. Lying in rather unruly waters, the Yarmouth Roads is an Early Modern Mediterranean merchant vessel located at a depth of -6m in the Solent Strait between the Isle of Wight and the south coast of mainland England. In using collage and transparency, I tried to negotiate the many layers of this shipwreck: its stratigraphy, centuries of deposition, decades of tidal erosion, seasons of excavation, and its countless unrecorded histories like palimpsests, neatly obscured from human access. Shipwrecks are often understood, even by archaeologists who study them, as little more than dead ships. Shipwreck Hauntographs seek to explore, through archaeological and artistic processes, shipwrecks as liminal objects that are capable of negotiating those murky, fluid boundaries between past and present, presence and absence.