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Contemporary Archaeology

"It seemed to me that the best place

for a work of art is in memory.
It doesn't matter how one gets there."

Cildo Meireles

The spectres born of unchecked production haunt our warehouses, our streets, our pavements, our tips — and the back rooms of our homes.
Disposable!?... Recyclable!?...

So meticulously was a given object devised — a utensil fashioned to fit the human hand, the fingers in their manifold sizes, conceived to hold a liquid whose colour had been so carefully engineered as to appear essential to life itself... and yet destined for a single use only, to be destroyed, or channelled into selective collection so as to re-emerge as raw material for another fleeting thing, a becoming of elements.

Another commodity, however, bears the mark of its time — though in our age an “era” may last scarcely longer than a season. A piece hailed as cutting-edge upon release is soon relic, preserved only by the affective bond of those who once handled it.

Obsolete, the “latest” products cede their place to those still newer. Designers, engineers and developers labour endlessly to integrate novelties — details to keep each item ceaselessly enticing, its innovations loudly heralded, as though it were truly unprecedented, unseen before in the marketplace.

Along this relentless course, what does not sink merely floats for a moment, before dissolving in the froth of disuse, vanishing into the distance of redundancy — a redundancy born of time itself.

Contemporary Archaeology is a series of works, objects of reference and relics of recent production, as though unearthed and salvaged from a future that is still today. By way of art they are transfigured into “golden pieces”, to which fresh value is conferred — for having been touched by the artist-Midas and by the media alike, a metaphor of art’s transformative power and of its precarious (and speculative) valuation in our own time.

The series is composed of Objects and Relics: the former, those immediately disposable after brief use; the latter, those hastily effaced by the frenzied churn of production lines and the demands of a competitive market.

Potentially fossilised, they are contemporary fossils — mirrors of the civilisation that fashioned them.

Orlando Rafael, 2025