Bodó, B. (2011). Contemporary Urban Archeology. Urban Report(1), 16-23.

 

Contemporary Urban Archeology

Photo: Tamás Budha, Miklós Rácz, András Tábori

The exhibition entitled “Metropolitan archeology” by Tamás Budha, András Tábori and Miklós Rácz was on show at the Holdudvar gallery from mid June to mid July 2010. We met with Miklós Rácz, the archeologist team member to talk about the project. The interview features photos from the exhibition.
Two artists and an archeologist decide to document the city… what does an archeologist do in contemporary culture?

MR: Archeology in a wider context means searching, identifying, naming, preserving and interpreting for contemporary society things which at some distant point in our culture have completely lost their function and meaning for some reason or another. When we narrow the gap between the two points in cultural history, that is, the one performing the archeological analysis and the other being the object of this analysis, we are looking at our own lives from an archeological perspective. This parly acts as a reflection on our archeological methods (why and to what degree is it legitimate to regard our objects of general archeological analysis as alien or distant at all) and partly as a reflection on our age (how we abandon and forget things in our surrounding world of objects and how this tells about ourselves, our lifestyles and our time).

How do you start to read a city when you look at it as an archeologist? All subcultures and groups sensitive to the specificities of urban space have their own methods to find what they are looking for, think graffiti artists, skateboarders or preservationists. How does a person with archeologist’s ambitions go out on the street, look for and find things? What do they regard as noise and what as noteworthy? How do they filter and select?

MR: We came up with the idea of metropolitan archeology at the end of 2008 when we walked through an area by the Nyugati railway station and found several things on the streets for which we could find a shared interpretation and which started to outline the themes of a research. The final impulse was a rusty sign on which we were trying to read the barely legible script from before its repaint. We photographed it and when we started looking for the details we found out that the sign high up on the firewall, which at first glance is completely covered in rust, had once actually been standing beside a road on the border of Hungary and the Czechoslovakian Transcarpathia (between 1920 and 1938). How could it end up here, how did it become an advertising signpost on a firewall in Budapest? This discovery was a striking revelation of the depths to be found behind these phenomena and thus we started to take observations and possible interpretations much more seriously. The concept of the collection came together shortly after this.

How did two artists active in street art and an archeologist come together to form a team?

MR: I had been present from the beginning in shaping the concept. We spent some years together with András at the ÁMRK (presently MNM-NÖK, the Central Storage, Archive and Processing facilities of the Hungarian National Museum) at the Department of Building Research where we worked on documenting protected buildings and building archeology, him as a draughtsman and myself as a researcher. Regarding the practice of building archeology I have learnt from him, as someone not strictly within the preservationist profession, a degree of self reflection and irony. The small printed labels denoting archeological findings sometimes appeared randomly placed on the walls of our office.

I also had another perspective on the environment besides that of archeology as I have a degree in architecture from the Ybl Miklós Polytechnic which I obtained parallel with my studies in Medieval and Early Modern archeology at ELTE Humanities. What mostly interests me is the research of ruins and buildings (and other, more practical matters as well, such as building preservation.)

Everything beyond the stones forming the space of the street is ephemeral. How do you select from this ephemeral world?

MR: At the phase of formulating the concept of collecting and the exhibition we came up with themes for ourselves which created a conceptional background, structuring our focus and our classification process of phenomena in urban space. On observing and documenting the act of analysis and the background processes also motivated us; we expected from ourselves and the others as well to go to the utmost depths of interpretation. The key aspect of selection was the degree to which we could attach a shared interpretation to the captured process and how clearly the cultural context creating the given constellation of objects was recognizable.

It is quite a contrast then that the exhibition contained almost no such interpretations, though almost any and all of the nearly 100 photos could obviously be turned into a book. Why did you choose not to be present in drawing up the context beyond the actions of collecting and selecting?

MR: The current lack of in-depth archeological interpretation and explanation of the material on show is largely due to the tight deadlines of this exhibition. This time we could mainly aim for presenting as archeological phenomena things that otherwise are not seen as such and suggest the possibilities of archeological interpretation. The only specific, long term and targeted documentation analyzed the transformations of an urban pathway.

What parts do you feel your own from this material? Can objects be appropriated? Do you see the age where these artifacts come from as yours? Can the street or its history be appropriated?

MR: I certainly see the age as mine. The phenomena and the streets by the way I don’t, but most of the time I regard their presence very important, they are instrumental in making me feel at home here and now.

Can the preservation of the artifacts be a goal, to extract them from the passing of time, from decay?

MR: In some cases this can be very important, but it necessittes choosing certain categories as inevitable extracts. Painted shop signs and labels, for instance, but even architectural or urban design concepts can be reinforced by consciously preserving certain contexts or sites or the more reflected and focused, thematic applications of the trendy but somewhat self-absorbed aesthetic and architecture of ruin bars (bars in abandoned downtown tenement buildings) in public spaces. Just to give you an example: the original pavement of the close to two thousand years old Roman road to Érd is in almost perfect condition and is now shown exposed as patches in the current low-traffic road on the same level with the asphalt surface. In contrast, the often very exquisite fin-de-siècle cobble stone pavements in Budapest largely disappeared under the asphalt; preserving their details does not even come by as an idea because it does not fit in the routine of dealing with public spaces. The original material is still there though and in certain locations ten meters of a hundred-year-old stone pavement could even serve to calm down the traffic.