Nick Shepherd
From 9 March 2017 Professor Nick Shepherd started – as Artist in Residence (AIR) – with the project The Walking Residency at the Reinwardt Academy.
By walking he enables students and lecturers to connect places, identities, stories, climate, nature, people and animals with each other in new ways. Shepherd: “I’m interested in notions of body as archive, landscape as archive and performance as archive.” Together with staff and students, he will explore the following issues:
- Artistic research: how do we draw on the resources of imagination, desire, creativity and the embodied and affective self, in the process of conventional academic work?
- Using walking as a methodology to engage landscapes and histories: how do we bring the body into play? How do we think through the body? What would it mean to break down conventional binaries between body and mind, reason and emotion, head and heart, subject and object, work and play?
- Rethinking time, materiality and memory: trapped in linear, modern conceptions of time, we have difficulty in thinking about the simultaneity of the past in the present, and the weight of our responsibilities towards future unborn generations.
Winter School in collaboration with Artis Zoo
The Reinwardt Academy is holding its first Winter School programme, a collaboration with Artis Zoo in Amsterdam, from 8 to 12 January, with Artist in Residence Nick Shepherd leading Master of Museology students in an exploration of the role of zoos in the ongoing Anthropocene epoch.
In a period when the earth and its ecosystems are being subjected to defining human influence, it is of relevant interest to examine the role and position of zoos. How are they responding to the challenges surrounding biodiversity and climate change? What form should a zoo take in the Anthropocene? The Master of Museology students attending this Winter School will conduct research to gain a deeper understanding of zoos in general, and Artis in particular, through subjects such as the presentation of biology, physics, colonialism and the arts.
Through this process, they will gain answers to questions such as: What are the reciprocal relations between not only various species, but also between animals, plants, the park, and visiting children and adults? What kind of encounters take place between people and animals? What does the term ‘decolonisation’ mean in the context of zoos? How do we experience the zoo if we use all our senses? And what is the role of the zoo in the city?
The Winter School will be led by the South African archaeologist Nick Shepherd, the Artist in Residence at Reinwardt Academy. Shepherd is associate professor of Archaeology and Heritage Studies at Aarhus University in Denmark and well-known for his published work that places archaeology in critical contrast with African society, popular history, collective memory, memory and heritage. He will be joined at the Winter School by the South African dancer Nicola Visser.
Biography
Nick Shepherd is Associate Professor of Archaeology and Heritage Studies at Aarhus University in Denmark. Until recently, he was Associate Professor of African Studies and Archaeology at the University of Cape Town, where he convened the graduate programme in Heritage and Public Culture in Africa. Besides that he was founding editor of the journal Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress and in 2004-2005 he was based at Harvard University as a Mandela Fellow.
He has published widely on questions of archaeology and society in Africa, and on questions of public history, memory and heritage. His most recent book is called Arqueología y decolonialidad (Archaeology and Decoloniality, 2016). Shepherd was also the supervisor of Christian Ernsten, lecturer heritage theory at the Reinwardt Academy, who recently obtained his doctorate at the University of Cape Town.
Please visit archaeologiesofmemory.org for more information.
NRC
Nick Shepherd and Christian Ernsten wrote a critical review in the NRC about the exhibition Goede Hoop at the Rijksmuseum. Also read the reaction from journalist Gretha Pama.