What is a society and how do we interpret its collapse? Rossella Biscotti’s multi-screen video installation The City (2018) situates the question in the archaeological site of Çatalhöyük, located in present-day southern Anatolia. A proto-city with a diverse population of thousands, Çatalhöyükwas occupied for nearly 20 centuries (c.7500 to 5700 BCE) and is one of the oldest Neolithic settlements. It was most likely abandoned after a crisis fomented by the overexploitation of natural resources in the area.
Discovered in 1958, since 1993 the site has hosted the Çatalhöyük Research Project, headed by Ian Hodder, a social anthropologist at Stanford. Hodder’s methods give equal weight to the systematic cataloguing of objects and remains as they do the subjective observations of archaeologists, anthropologists, artists, scientists and local residents. This interdisciplinary approach relies on both material and immaterial facets ranging from building techniques and botanical studies to cultural constructs such as religion, property or privacy. Biscotti shot The City during the last two years of Hodder’s initiative: although the site’s closure had been scheduled, excavations were brought to an abrupt end in 2016 after the attempted military coup in Turkey. Like their Neolithic counterparts, the team had to migrate elsewhere.
The film documents how researchers study the vestiges of a bygone civilization linked to a place and time in human history, while also portraying them as a site- and time-specific community. After The City debuted at Kunsthaus Baselland last spring, Biscotti spent a month in Sicily to follow a new meeting of the Çatalhöyük’s team, who continue to research the city remotely. Biscotti’s works, which regularly draw on archival materials, often investigate past events as well as uncertainties surrounding their interpretation. In Il Processo (The Trial, 2010–13, presented at dOCUMENTA (13)), for instance, she reconstructed the controversial trial for terrorism held in Rome in 1982–84 against a group of militants and intellectuals, formerly members of the leftist movement Autonomia Operaia. Biscotti used a six-hour audio cut of the court recordings, live readings and a set of ‘archaeological’ concretecasts of the high-security courtroom, whose original architecture had in the meantime been altered and hence lost.