In the hills near my home village on the Altriver banks, traces of two Neolithic settlements were discovered and have been researched since the 19th century.
As children, my brother and I rode our bikes to those hills on hot summer days. We often daydreamed of performing our own excavations on-site and conjured up a fantastic history out of the artefacts that we could have found in the loam. This significantly shaped my perception of time and the place I grew up in. Prehistoric splinters overlay with those of my childhood, merging together in my memory as belonging to a time and space where the fictional and historical are intertwined.
In this work I revisit objects from my childhood and turn them into timeless fragments. Clay sculptures that my brother and I once envisioned unearthing from the soil, we now shape from the memory of an imagined time and mail as gifts between us.
I write short poems — my remembrances on the space — and attribute each of them to actual Neolithic discoveries. Feeding the AI with this duos I carve out a space for the finds that do not exist anymore in the environment they were preserved in. Some meld into a generated landscape, while others take on forms within spaces yet to be conceived. The archeological object is contextualised by my own biased recollections but also by the biased data of the AI. A new relationship between artefact and landscape is created, shedding light on the challenges archeology is still confronted with.
On the hills back home, my process is that of an archeologist. I explore and transform the current landscape by searching through my memories and build an imagined archeological report. Fictionally reconstructing the past and assigning the real a fantasised narrative, I situate myself where (when) the Altriver turns, to hide and seek.