Symposium 
26th-27th May 2022, Venice

Zoë Crossland 
Associate Professor of Anthropology, Director of the Center for Archaeology, Columbia University, Department of Anthropology 

Abstract

Tracing identity: the semeiotics of the biological profile.

This presentation explores what a semeiotic perspective might offer toward understanding how claims about identity are made and reaffirmed as part of the work of constructing a biological profile from human osteological remains. How might a more fluid and unsettled understanding of the trace help us reconceptualize the broader impulses at play in classifying and describing human remains? I argue that a semeiotic approach opens or affords different possibilities for analysis and representation of the dead, that enable us to find more productive ways to express identity. This is both to recognize the importance of different dimensions of identity to the living, while not reifying and fixing such identities in the traces of the skeleton in ways that make them seem permanent or immutable.

Biography

Zoë Crossland is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. Her research deals with the historical archaeology of Madagascar, and with evidential practices around human remains. Her approach to historical inquiry is informed by Peircean "semeiotics," which she uses to explore the imbrication of the material and the immaterial, the human and the nonhuman. In her work on forensic evidence and the archaeological production of the dead body, Crossland considers the work of inference and practical activity by which archaeology conjures and evaluates competing claims about the past. She is presently working on a book, The Speaking Corpse, which teases out the different evidential relations through which the forensic corpse presents itself as witness. She does this by attending to the ways in which the evidence of the dead is explained and delineated for popular consumption by forensic anthropologists.  zoe.crossland@columbia.edu

Massimo Leone 
Full Professor of Semiotics, University of Turin, Department of Philosophy,  Full Permanent Professor at Shanghai University

Abstract

From Skulls to Numbers:

Measuring, Calculus, and Meaning of the Face from Early Modern Dissections to AI Reconstructions.

Starting from the first early modern skull dissections, Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica (1543), the homonymous work by Adriaan van den Spiegel (1627), and especially after the publication of Petrus Camper’s Dissertation on the Real Differences in Facial Features of Men of Different Countries and Ages (1790), efforts to reduce the beauty of the face to a system of measurable proportions, and ultimately to a single figure — which Camper identified as the “facial angle” — multiplied. This diagrammatization of the face was inspired by the canon of Greek statuary, but it turned into the lodestar of the archeological survey of skulls from a remote past, of the ethnographic study of human faces and skulls from distant lands, and of their visual representation, with a proliferation of instruments invented to automate this process of standardization, from Paul Broca’s craniograph to the photographic grids and devices of Alphonse Bertillon and the first British ethnography. But the automated geometrization of the face in function of an ideal formula hid, as it is well known, the prejudices of the theory of races, and a racist concept of the evolution of the human species. The talk will wonder whether the idea of an ideal digitization of the face might still be at work in the ultimate results of this controversial quest, those that delegate to AI algorithms the automatic reading of faces, their typological grouping, and the production of “ideal faces” in digital arts, including those that propose 2D or 3D renderings of faces from the past.

Biography

Massimo Leone is Tenured Full Professor (“Professore Ordinario”) of Philosophy of Communication, Cultural Semiotics, and Visual Semiotics at the Department of Philosophy and Educational Sciences, University of Turin, Italy, Vice-Director for research at the same University, and part-time Professor of Semiotics in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, University of Shanghai, China. He has been visiting professor at several universities in the five continents. He has single-authored twelve books, edited more than thirty collective volumes, and published more than five hundred articles in semiotics, religious studies, and visual studies. He is the chief editor of Lexia, the Semiotic Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Communication, University of Torino, Italy (SCOPUS). He is the winner of a 2018 ERC Consolidator Grant, the most prestigious research grant in Europe.

Francesco Mazzucchelli 
Researcher in Semiotics, Università di Bologna

Abstract

Notes for a forensic semiotics. Aesthetics and ontologies of forensic archaeology and their influence on processes of memory-making

In the last years, forensic methods and procedures have been imported into archaeology and employed especially for the investigation of events of political violence, genocides, and political conflicts of the recent history. New analyses of war and genocide landscapes (e.g., Holocaust sites, mass graves and other locations in which political violence has occurred) have been conducted using new technologies (such as GPS scanning of the terrain), in order to “locate, record, analyse and (re-)present the above- and below-ground evidence” (Sturdy Colls 2016) visibly and invisibly contained in the landscape. All these new methods have enriched the field of conflict and genocide archaeology, and some have talked of a ‘forensic turn’, which is affecting the discipline (Dziuban 2017). One could say that this paradigm shift has turned the archaeological fieldwork into a crime-scene, to be investigated with the forensic techniques, but somehow the objects to which forensic archaeology directs its scrutiny are not different from those of traditional archaeology: physical remnants, material objects, ruined spatial structures, biological traces. What is different is the semiotic role that is ascribed to materiality, that becomes carrier of an “evidence of things” (Ian Hacking) and assumes a non-human agency. Moving from my experience of collaboration with forensic and conflict archaeologists (in particular during the participation to the international project Terrorscapes, coordinated by Rob van der Laarse) and from some considerations that I proposed in an essay in which I advocate for a confederation between forensic and semiotic approaches (Mazzucchelli 2017), in this paper I aim at exploring the possibilities of cross-fertilization between semiotics and forensic archaeology.

Through the discussion of some examples, I will focus especially on two levels of the possible re-reading of forensic archaeology’s categories through a semiotic gaze:

1. 1. The redefinition of the notion of trace, that is more and more mediated by devices of processing and visualization of the ‘given’ and is the result of a different semiotic and ‘narrative’ role accorded to materiality as ‘non-human witness’ (A. Janus and R. Sendyka (2021) speaks of “non discursive archives”). This aspect will be framed through two opposite positions, here represented by, on the one hand, a reading of the “evidential paradigm” proposed by historian Carlo Ginzburg and, on the other hand, an essay by Paolo Fabbri in which he criticizes the ‘iconic paradigm’, proposing instead a method of trace-reading that mediates and translates different “sources of enunciation”. 
2. The language and aesthetics of forensic and the overlapping of different discursive domains (scientific, juridical, historical, artistic) and the practices of memorialization that this generates. This new focus on material evidence (and the new conception of materiality, and its semiotic role, that it entails) has also produced a “forensic aesthetics” (Keenan Weizman 2012) that affects the process of memorialization, calling for a re-thinking of the processes of memory-making and then the way in which the history of these sites (which plays a crucial role in the auto-representation of collective identities) is translated into the “discourse of collective memory”.

Biography

Francesco Mazzucchelli is Senior Assistant Professor at the University of Bologna, where he teaches Semiotics of Memory. He is the Director of Trame – Center for the Semiotic Study of Memory and is affiliated with the Center for the Studies of the Humanities ‘Umberto Eco’ at the University of Bologna. He is interested to the semiotic aspects of the materiality of memory and to the relation between memory and spatiality, with a specific focus on practices of urban memory rewriting and the mobilisation of cultural heritage. His most recent publication is the edited book (together with Gruia Badescu and Britt Baillie) Transforming Heritage in the Former Yugoslavia: Synchronous Pasts (Palgrave, 2021).

Marilena Delli Umuhoza 
writer, music producer, radio presenter at Radio Radicale

Ian Brennan Grammy's winner Music producers and writer

Abstract

Decolonising silenced music and musicians

This paper offers a comparative case study to archaeology bringing to the stage of this symposium on identity the discrepancy between the music industry and the worldwide music culture. It will demonstrate the absence of fair representation and democracy in the international POP culture, while highlighting the need for an important labour of cultural decolonization and deconstruction of mechanisms through which the music business ends up silencing the voices of a consistent slice of the entire world population. This is a system where technology, rather than allowing to distribute and share its power in an equitable and democratic way, embodies a centralizing function; and where the commercialization mass production end up by corrupting the arts and putting the entire culture of sharing at risk. The critique of such system, that puts the industrialized countries in the position to recolonize the world through mass media that endanger local cultures, is at the core of this talk because if we do not act this way, the idea of the public independently enjoying music will stay a sheer illusion. Given these premises, the talk will take us through the 13 years’ partnership of the two authors, that has produced so far the international publication of 37 albums in 25 different languages, recording musical voices that would have otherwise gone lost. The climax will be reached with screening of short movies and photos from some of the least musically visible world areas. This will illustrate the recording process in which Ian Brennan engages in full respect of the freedom of expression of the most diverse artists: mice sellers, prisoners, ostracized groups, and much more. 

Biography

Marilena and Ian’s journey started from Rwanda, the country of Marilena's mother, to embrace 4 continents, allowing over 20 artists to leave their home country for the first time on tour. Their work provides a stage for artists otherwise unheard or censored. Like the women accused of witchcraft in Ghana, whose voices inspired the album WITCH CAMP GHANA; and the albino community of Ukerewe Island, part of a workshop that gave birth to the album TANZANIA ALBINISM COLLECTIVE that allowed to safeguard languages ​​such as kikerewe and jeeta, dialects whose speakers are discouraged from speaking after the unification of the country in 1964. At the base of their projects is a work of recovery and preservation of idioms ​​and musical languages at extinction risk. An example is the signed album "God is not a terrorist" by the last master of Surti, the Pakistani Ustad Saami, a precursor of ancient sacred music qawwali. Despite threats from Islamic fundamentalists, Ustad spent his life practicing this endangered art, handed down from generation to generation since the XXIII century.

Ian Brennan is a Grammy award-winning music producer, which for the past 10 years has worked on 37 albums by international artists (Tinariwen, Zomba Prison Project, Ramblin ’Jack Elliott) from four continents (Africa, Europe, Asia and the United States). Author of six books, he has held violence prevention seminars around the world since 1993 for prestigious organizations such as UC Berkley University, the University of London and New York's New School.  

Marilena Delli Umuhoza, MA in Foreign Languages and Literatures for International Communication, has a background in cinema studies at UCLA. Daughter of a woman from Rwanda and a man from Bergamo, she has signed two books on racism in Italy and leads a radio program dedicated to Afro-descendant excellence on Radio Radicale. As a photographer and film-director, she has worked in partnership with her husband Ian Brennan to over 37 albums by artists from around the world, obtaining international recognition and awakening the attention of mass media on racism and diversity in the world of music and literature. Her works have been published in international newspapers and broadcasters such as the New York Times, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, CNN and BBC.

Franciscu Sedda 
Associate Professor of Semiotics, Università di Cagliari, Lettere e Filosofia

Abstract

Nuraghi and the knots of Sardinians’ identification

The goal of our intervention is twofold. On the one hand, we will analyze the treatment of the so-called “Nuragic civilization” and its symbolic object, the Nuraghe, within a series of historiographical and political discourses over the course of the last few centuries. On the other hand, we will try to put these historical arguments over past and memory in correlation with the more general becoming of Sardinians' consciousness.

Beyond the contemporary (and ambiguous) vaunted pride of identity, the story of the social definition of the meaning of the nuraghes (and with them also that of the so called Giants of Mont'e Prama) appears other than peaceful and shared, revealing the texture of complex semiopolitical conflicts. The very definition of the collective that built the nuraghi through the name of the architectural object rather than with the ethnonym “Sardinians” testify this. A failure of self-denomination which conceals and at the same time reveals an unsolved knot of identification, both archaeological and political.

Biography

Franciscu Sedda is Associate Professor at the University of Cagliari, Department of Literature, Languages and Cultural Heritage. Here he teaches “Semiotics of Language and Languages”, “Semiotics of Contemporary Communication” and “Cultural Semiotics”. He has been visiting professor at Harvard University and Pontificia Universidade de São Paulo. He has occupied the position of vice-president in the Italian Association of Semiotic Studies (2007-2009) and since January 2017 is the Secretary General of the Italian Society of Philosophy of Language. He edited the collection of essays by Jurij M. Lotman Tesi per una semiotica delle culture (Rome, 2006), the book by the same J.M Lotman, Retorica (Rome, 2021) and wrote the entry “Semiotics of Culture(s)” for the International Handbook of Semiotics (Berlin, 2015). Among his books: Tradurre la tradizione. Sardegna: su ballu, i corpi, la cultura (Rome 2013, new edition Milan, 2019), Imperfette traduzioni. Semiopolitica delle culture (Rome, 2012), Roma. Piccola storia simbolica (with Paolo Sorrentino, Rome, 2019), Su porceddu. Storia di un piatto, racconto di un popolo (Cagliari, 2020). Among his edited volumes and reviews: Glocal. Sul presente a venire (Rome, 2004), Isole. Un arcipelago semiotico (Rome, 2019), Isolanità. Per una semiotica culturale delle isole (with Paolo Sorrentino, Lexia, Rome, 2020), Glocalization and Everyday Life (with Ugo Dessì, Glocalism, Milan, 2021). 

Peter Van Dommelen 
Director, Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World; Joukowsky Family Professor in Archaeology; Professor of Anthropology and Italian Studies

Abstract

Of Figs and Pomegranates: Exploring Subalternity in the Ancient Mediterranean

Ceterum Censeo Carthaginem Esse Delendam is the apocryphal but universally known rejoinder that Cato the Elder, a respected Roman Senator in the mid-second century BCE, relied on to call for the destruction of the North African city of Carthage, despite a formal treaty and the absence of a casus belli. He also brought plump, ripe figs onto the Senate floor to make his case that Carthage represented an existential threat to Rome. He was ultimately successful and Roman legions razed Carthage to the ground in 146 BCE.

This episode is usually interpreted in light of Cato’s words, apocryphal or not, to highlight Roman military might, in the typical conventional fashion of elite histories centered on male political leaders and battlefield achievements, deceitful or otherwise – in my paper, I want to highlight Cato’s figs instead. These fruits and many others besides, not least pomegranates, the malum punicum, stood at the heart of the booming Carthaginian economy, which in turn was built on the hard labor of countless unnamed rural communities, who assiduously cultivated a wide array of crops, including both cereals and tree crops, that fed the growing urban crowds of the ancient world. Overlooked, if not outright dismissed in conventional accounts of the ancient Mediterranean, these rural communities were not only key economic producers, but they also constituted large and culturally distinct social groups with their own traditions and ways of living – not unlike the ‘subaltern classes’ of Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and Southern Question.

Drawing on Gramsci’s notion of subalternity and Archaeology’s ability to shine a light on these rural communities, their practices and cultural traditions, it is my intention to discuss the extensive material remains of rural life and agrarian production during the final centuries of the first millennium BCE and to outline an alternative decolonial perspective on the ancient Mediterranean.

Biography

Peter van Dommelen is Director of the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, Joukowsky Family Professor in Archaeology, and Professor of Anthropology and Italian Studies. He is a Mediterranean archaeologist, whose research and teaching revolve around the rural Mediterranean past and present. The regional focus of his work lies in the western Mediterranean, where he carries out long-term fieldwork on the island of Sardinia. He concentrates on later Mediterranean prehistory and the earlier part of Classical Antiquity - roughly the first millennium BCE – but comparative studies of ethnographic and recent historical context in the Mediterranean and elsewhere play a crucial role in his research and teaching.

He read Archaeology and Classics at the University of Leiden (the Netherlands), specializing in Theoretical and Classical Archaeology (MA, 1990; PhD, 1998); he also studied Anthropology and Material Culture at UCL (1991). He taught Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of Glasgow between 1997 and 2012, before coming to Brown University. He serves as director of the Joukowsky Institute since 2015. He has held visiting appointments at the Universities of Valencia (Spain, 2005-06), Cagliari (Sardinia, 2011) and the Balearics (Mallorca, 2012).

Dima Srouji 
Architect and Visual Artist, Researcher Leading the MA City Design Studio a the RCA Royal College of Arts, London

Abstract

Politics of the Underground

The stories of our Palestinian ancestors, embedded underground in archeological strata have been displaced and misrepresented for decades. In Palestine, due to the long history of settler colonialism and the current Israeli occupation, the underground and its past is narrated by those with power, rendering the ground and its artifacts through a narrowed single narrative that serves a single-identity nation-building of the state of Israel. Although biblical archeology gained popularity a century ago, it continues to be a form that allows archeologists and some of their funding institutions to comb through strata in the ways that serve those interested in proving the bible through scientific means. Because of this, archeological sites in Palestine were used as tools for colonization and are still weaponized today towards further occupation and settlement expansion.

The embedded trauma in the ground over a century of subterranean abuse remains. My research and work look at multiple scales, the ground itself as an object of trauma, as well as the artefacts that were extracted from that ground using Palestinian female and child labour. The talk will look at the specific case study of Sebastia, an archeological site in Nablus, in the West Bank. The case study reveals a century of history starting with the Harvard Excavations in 1908 and touches on Israeli and settler violence in the living and breathing Palestinian city today. Further, the talk will look at my own practice as an artist and architect in finding ways to transform that trauma by replicating displaced glass vessels as a form of imaginary restitution, and short films that aim to untangle and make sense of our history.

Biography

Dima Srouji is a Palestinian architect exploring the power of the ground, its strata, and its artefacts in revealing silenced narratives and embedded intergenerational memories. The practice excavates moments of potential imaginary liberation searching for ruptures through the coupled past and present colonization and occupation of Palestine while forging methods for collective becomings. She works with glass, text, archives, maps, plaster casts, and film, understanding each as an evocative object and emotional companion. Her projects are developed closely with archaeologists, anthropologists, sound designers, and glassblowers, as she believes collaboration is integral in the collective process towards liberation.  The practice is situated within a decolonization space and functions through critical cartography, deep mapping, and critical analysis methodologies. She is a graduate of the Yale School of Architecture, and in 2016  founded  Hollow Forms, a glassblowing project with the Twam family in Jaba’ that aims to reactivate the industry and shed light on the history of glass in the region. She is currently leading the MA City Design studio at the Royal College of Art, London.

Mauro Puddu (Convenor) 
Marie Curie Fellow Researcher of Archaeology, Ca' Foscari University Venice

Abstract

The Body of The Archaeologist: Exposing A Long-Overlooked Semiotic Interpretant

Until two years ago, we used to live in an historical period when everything – a book, a massage, or a piping hot pizza – could be delivered to anybody in the space of few days, hours, or even minutes. Nevertheless, the delivery riders’ voices tended to disappear amongst the chaos of lively cities. With the first lockdown imposed by the pandemic, though, in the silence of empty cities and deserted streets, the delivery riders’ voices started to exit the anonymity. Their faces became suddenly familiar to the customers, and accredited by public opinion in the press for allowing the quick movement of essential commodities. As a result of this visibility, their poor work conditions reached the hotspot, and they were acknowledged as essential workers. During the same lockdown though, few other workers’ categories did not stop going physically to their workplace. Amongst them were are archaeologists. In Britain, archaeologists never underwent the lockdown, acquiring de facto the status of essential workers. Nonetheless, working mainly in fenced building sites, their faces stayed blurry and their voices unheard.

In this paper, I use examples from construction/archaeological sites in United Kingdom to debate the meanings of the unknown place in which archaeologists, and specifically their body, still stand in modern society, discussing the semiotic potential of its exposure. To this day, there is no clear idea in modern societies around what an archaeologist at work does and why. Certainly, the sweetened cinematic images of archaeologists with either a little brush or a whip in their hands do not contribute much to the visibility of a body in motion as is the one of the archaeologist at work. As do not the dramatic titles on the news celebrating sensational finds by one individual. But there is more. It is sufficient to scroll down the thousands of images of archaeologists at work on the web to realise that the body of the archaeologist is, when not celebrated for its spectacular find, neutralised. Those images, often released by specialised journals aiming to promote archaeology, spin around tidiness, cleanliness, motionless. Moreover, the digital turn of archaeology that academia has been taking – mostly uncritically – in the last twenty years, contributes to this removal. By exposing the body of the archaeologist as a crucial semiotic element – what American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce calls interpretant – for a sustainable understanding of the materiality of the past, I will argue here that at the core of the relationship between archaeology and modern society is physical labour, and the stigma it suffers as opposed to intellectual advancement. This semiotic artifice will help me, through abundancy of visual examples, to unveil how a genuine investigation of the real conditions faced daily by the body of the archaeologist contribute to broaden our knowledge of the past in harmony with – rather than detached from – our critical understanding of current society.    

Biography

Mauro Puddu is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellow in archaeology at Ca’ Foscari. He is interested in the Mediterranean region during the Roman period and the Late Antiquity, with a specific geographic focus on Sardinia. His research questions, imbued with a systematic theoretical approach that relies on semiotics, postcolonial studies, and critical theory, engage with the traces of ancient practices as fragments of social identities built both in antiquity and, as a reflex, in our times. After obtaining his MA at UCL and PhD at the University of Cambridge, Mauro Puddu aligned to his research activity several years of work on the field as archaeologist in United Kingdom first, and as a director of the archaeological site of Nuraghe Seruci (Gonnesa, Sardinia).