Two archaeologists, standing ankle deep in November mud, turn to face the camera – they’re not posing with a typical shovel in hand, but rather, dressed head to toe in authentic costumes of the Bronze Age. Behind them, a soundtrack specifically crafted for the moment seems to echo off the hairs of the fur pelt costumes. It’s not everyday that a culture from thousands of years ago gets to take center stage, but at the November 2019 opening of ANTIQUARIUM in Colli sul Velino, the visual, intellectual, and material gap between two distant epochs seems to diminish.

Conceived and curated by Cornelia Lauf, and executed with John Cabot Master’s of Art History students, the event focused on the continuation of a larger conversation on the relevancy of the Bronze Age. Part performance and part didactic, the opening combined the work of contemporary artists Dennis Balk, DJ Cilloman, Emilio Corti, Jeremy Deller, Miltos Manetas, Nathaniel Mellors, Jonathon Monk, and Haim Steinbach. Themes of time, materiality, and continuation were explored, such as a showing of Mellor’s Sun on the Back Wall directly on the dig site. The final moment of the archeo-performance concluded how it began – a return to the earth. Monk’s contribution was concise: a direction to bury a bronze object at the Paduli site. Finally picking up a trowel, the Sapienza archaeologists gathered around and did the reverse of what they are accustomed to, burying instead of removing an object from the ground.

BRONZE AGE NOW is an ongoing project and continues to develop.