Craft, clay and chronotopes

A feature piece by Lance Peng with reflections by Roderick Geerts

There is something haunting about craft….about the soft spiral of a thumb pressed into clay, the dusty ridges of a pot retrieved from earth after centuries of burial, the quiet alchemy of throwing, shaping, firing. The past is never just the past in archaeology, especially not when it takes form again (not metaphorically but literally) on a wheel, under the hands of someone who knows. This is what first struck me when I encountered Rodericvs, the living, breathing, spinning extension of Roderick Geerts, whose work as both a PhD researcher in Roman archaeology and a master ceramicist/experimental archaeologist slips and slides across temporal boundaries with an ease that is anything but casual. To me he is a time traveller of a particular kind: one who neither romanticises the past nor reduces it to data. Instead he crafts it….coils it, shapes it, burns it and in doing so, opens up a different kind of relation to history: one that is intimate, material, affectively charged.

Turning from the Ruin: A Hauntological Analysis of ZA/UM’s Disco Elysium

A Bachelor thesis with reflections from Lilja

Link to thesis, Turning from the Ruin: A Hauntological Analysis of ZA/UM’s Disco Elysium
https://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn%3Anbn%3Ase%3Ahh%3Adiva-55473

Synthesised nostalgia: Exploring Inal Bilsel’s retro-futuristic sounds

A feature piece by Lance Peng on Inal Bilsel

With over two decades of experience in the music industry, Inal Bilsel has carved out a unique artistic identity—one that fuses music, visual arts and speculative narratives. A multifaceted composer, performer and educator, Inal’s work is a journey through contrasting worlds: fact and fiction, nostalgia and future dystopia, narrative and conceptual abstraction. His sound is influenced by science fiction, retro-futurism and musical hauntology, a genre that evokes the echoes of lost futures and fragmented memories. Whether through electronic compositions, orchestral pieces or immersive audio-visual performances, he pushes the boundaries of what music can communicate.

Hauntological Form: Where We Might Find the New in Contemporary Videogames

A post by James Sweeting

Introduction

To answer the question “where might we find the new” this paper will provide insight into the circumstances that encapsulate contemporary videogames. Acknowledging that since the start of the new millennium the future has been increasingly difficult to locate, simultaneously, contemporary videogames have been preoccupied with looking towards the past for answers. Nostalgia has often been considered as a potential source for the state of reverie that the past provides, whether that be from history or media form. However, nostalgia is not the source of the increasing reliance on the past, rather it is the identifiable symptom of something else, that being hauntology. 

Roots to Routes: Community Resilience through Ancestral Knowledge

A post by Lance Peng

In a world where progress and innovation are often prioritised, I highlight the need to reconnect with the past, drawing on the wisdom passed down through generations. Mnemohistory, which focuses on how societies remember and reinterpret their history, shows that communities don’t just preserve events but also pass on cultural practices, stories, and shared experiences that shape their identities, and by tracing developmental paths through this historical knowledge, we can see how communities use their past to deal with present challenges and plan for the future. This approach goes beyond written records, exploring how the act of remembering and reimagining the past connects with shaping the future, with ancestral knowledge serving as a key resource in strengthening community resilience.

Hauntology and nostalgia in the touristed landscapes of Sarajevo

A post by Marta Roriz

Introduction

Tourism has today a significant impact on cities and urban lives around the world. Urban tourism and the exploration of local topographies as tourist destinations have led to a complex co-production and co-consumption of urban spaces by tourists and local residents. The significative increase of tourism following the Second World War, in both developed and developing countries, is the result of various economic, technological, social and political changes (Wearing, Stevenson and Young 2010; Graburn 1989; Urry 2002), leading Crick (1989: 310) to describe it as “the largest movement of human populations outside wartime”. People travel for pleasure, but also to experience new places as well as to return to the familiar and the known. Some are motivated to learn about other people and cultures, while others seek to gain insights into the self through travel (Wearing, Stevenson and Young 2010).

Motherhood : on haunting and failure

A PhD thesis with reflections from Anna Johnson

Link to thesis, Motherhood: on haunting and failure

https://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/id/eprint/56830/