Tower
Decipherment of lost languages within architecture.
The Rosetta Stone is an ancient stele that allowed for the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphics. The decree inscribed on the stone is reiterated in three languages: hieroglyphics, demotic, and Ancient Greek.
The decipherment of one has led to the decipherment of the others.
You are essentially trying to decode an object without a decipherable language: site. This project does not seek to address this issue, but rather exhibit it.
The gallery space versus the origin point (excavation zone) have little to no interaction. The objects within the gallery have no context and therefore become a romantic notion of otherness.
Archaeology as a discipline has been tainted by “treasure hunting,” popularized by films like Indiana Jones, and despite professional archaeology’s attempts to right this wrong, its implications are still upheld in in institutions like the British Museum.
The images used in the sections and final model are stolen artifacts, acquired with a colonialist agenda in mind. The exhibition of these artifacts is of direct consequence to the origin peoples.
While museums should be a place of education, they have been misappropriated as prejudicial, reinforcing negative ideas of primitivism predominantly directed towards non-Western cultures.