Between June 2019 and June 2020, I carried out a collecting and exhibition experiment titled Insignificants, exploring the epistemological and aesthetic potential of trifles and things lying around in the everyday periphery of our attention. During the spring of 2020, the initiative was marked by the COVID-19, which restricted conditions for fieldwork and public outreach, adding to the withdrawn nature of the insignificant. However, instead of suspending activities, I decided to explore how the restrictions might engender potentially creative obstacle to my activities, redirect them and force them to assume new form. As it turned out, I had to attend to a local and very superficial topography. This accentuated the incidentalness of my observations, reinforcing my speculative and fabulatory approach to the insignificant and the random. Tapping into the Lunch Club Series theme of an archaeology of seclusion, my paper will focus, in particular, on “oblivion, withdrawal, and caprice”, grounding myself in a feminist epistemology centred on the ethics of undecidability and the aesthetics of the neglected.  

For more information about Insignificants and the exhibition series, please visit: https://speculativehub.com/about-insignificants/ 

Tim Flohr Sørensen is Associate Professor of Contemporary Archaeology and Archaeological Theory at the University of Copenhagen. He is also the Deputy Head of the Saxo Institute there, and the Director of the Hub for Speculative Fabulations upon Incidental Observations, which represents a network of researchers with an interest in the modest, the ignored, and that which leads thoughts astray. He received his Ph.D. from Aarhus University in Archaeology and Linguistics. He is interested in probing deep into the surface, exploring archaeological challenges with a persistent urgency within the discipline. His current research explores archaeological de/formation processes at cemeteries and in various modern ruins, including decaying domestic architecture, military facilities, and industry.