The Post-Material Antiquarian

HD video, 23:08, 2015

 

In The Post-Material Antiquarian, a strange kind of time-warp opens across the ancient British landscape, stitched together from reworked footage of The Modern Antiquarian (originally aired on BBC Two in 2000). In that program, musician, modern antiquarian and archdrude Julian Cope traversed the moors, hills, and coastlines of the British Isles, preaching his gospel of ancient stone circles and forgotten sites of ritual significance. But here, that journey is altered—retrofitted into a new speculative fiction.

As Cope passionately speaks about neolithic alignments and sacred geometries, the stones themselves appear transformed. Superimposed upon these ancient monuments are anachronistic structures—totems of consumer waste and urban detritus: plastic monobloc chairs arranged in heaping clusters, scaffolding tangled with netting, rusted cars teetering upon dolmens. Are these offerings? Pranks? Ruins of a later, industrial age? The viewer is left to wonder: has time folded over itself, or is this some parallel archive, a documentary not of our past but of our near future?

Julian walks among these objects seemingly undisturbed, reverent as ever. Is he aware of the contamination? Or has he, too, become a ghost in a simulation—an unreliable narrator speaking from inside a corrupted loop of history? His poetic monologues take on new, unintended meanings against the backdrop of glass, plastic and metal. The sacred and the profane collapse into each other.

The Post-Material Antiquarian explores how the myths we construct around land and history are always provisional—mutable, subjective, and deeply shaped by what we choose to see (or superimpose) upon the world. Folklore becomes landfill. Heritage becomes hoax. Time becomes trash. And yet, within the absurdity, something genuinely spiritual lingers. A future archaeology is born.

 

Animation, edit and sound:
Rustan Söderling