Please join UT Antiquities Action for our third annual symposium, 'Erasing, Defacing, Replacing: The Coercion and Control of Things in Times of Conflict and Change' on Saturday, April 7, from 9 AM - 3 PM in GSB 2.124. 

This year's symposium examines processes of disruption, destruction, and reappropriation. For a detailed program agenda, please visit: https://www.facebook.com/events/498955967167038/ and/or: https://art.utexas.edu/event/erasing-defacing-replacing-coercion-control-things. 

We humans invest feelings in the things we make. The deliberate act of suppressing, destroying, or altering things of cultural value is thereafore an inherently political and radically disruptive act. It is also ritual: by diminishing, demeaning, or extinguishing things, people may symbolically seek to subject those who value them to the same fate. But erasure is not always complete: elements of the old form often survive as inanimate hostages of the newin the form of trophies of conquest. 

Today, such processes of disruption, destruction, and reappropriation are as strong as ever. In Austin, we are witnesses to processes of gentrification by which the physical culture of traditional neighborhoods is demolished, painted over, or erased. Even campus libraries are under threat as a debate simmers over whether they should remain as vast repositories of physical things, or whether those things should be surrendered to the virtual world of electronic or remote access. Worries persist that such a radical displacement will, over time, devolve into an erasure.

UT Antiquities Action is grateful for the generous sponsorship of the Department of Art & Art History, the Department of Classics, the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, the Mesoamerica Center, and the Center for Latin American Visual Studies (CLAVIS) at UT Austin.