When I Look at the Landscape I See Beneath It
Two films by Maeve Brennan
Rose Higham-Stainton
An Excavation
Director MAEVE BRENNAN
Year
2022
Country
UK
Siticulosa
Director MAEVE BRENNAN
Year
2025
Country
UK, DENMARK
What is a scar but a story, a
threshold, an invitation? In An Excavation and Siticulosa, Maeve Brennan traces the looting of ancient antiquities from tombs in the
Southern Italian region of Puglia and archaeologists’ attempts to recover and
reconstruct what was lost. Some time before 8 BC, Horace described this arid
landscape as “Apuglia Siticulosa”—siticulosa meaning, in Latin,
to ‘feel thirst’—and its plains and plateaus continue to crack open like scars,
like language, exposing the shapes of tombs amongst the crops. Enter the tombaroli,
Italian for ‘tomb robber’, who probe the earth with a specialised but simple
tool, detecting empty spaces below the surface, distinguishing the dead space
of previously raided tombs from those rich with antiquities.
In An Excavation, made several years before Siticulosa, we begin at the end. Or rather, with what remains: the fragments of a vase recovered from Geneva Freeport in 2014, part of 45 crates of antiquities that have been sold, transported, washed like money, bereft of provenance, born again but different. A pair of archaeologists—Dr. Christos Tsirogiannis and Dr. Vinnie Norskov—are tasked with looking for criminal evidence of the looters and unwrap the decorative terracotta fragments like gifts. Beatrice Dillon’s delicate score for the Kanun, a traditional Middle Eastern instrument (played here by Kostantinos Glynos), is intercut with the faint shrill of fired earth reverberating against the archaeologists’ fingers, their nails, and the hard surface of their work bench. They turn and inspect each fragment and attempt to fit them back together according to an original pictorial composition. There, a wing of Eros. Here, Persephone.
The story—for there is always a story—goes like this: one day Persephone, daughter of Zeus and Demeter, is out picking flowers with her mother (the goddess of agriculture) when she’s abducted by Hades (god of the underworld). Hades makes Persephone his queen, and Demeter is heartbroken, so Zeus brokers a deal with Hades: for half the year, Persephone will live in the underworld with Hades, the other half, above ground, with her loving mother. The ancient Greeks believed that this created the seasons: when Demeter was parted from her child, all of earth withered into autumn and winter; when Persephone returned to her mother, the earth rejoiced and was brought back to life.
Both Brennan’s films attend to the brink space between under and over—what is dead and what is alive. They challenge a contemporary onus towards upward growth and mobility by bringing these subterranean riches to the surface.
And by ‘rich’, I mean—rich with information. An Excavation dwells not only on the antiquities but on the materials that were recovered with them, closing in on the Antiquities Trade Gazette (1990 edition) repurposed as wrapping material, the looter’s polaroids, FRAGILE labels, cardboard boxes, padding. “We will never be able to reconstruct the specific history of that person that was buried here,” says Tsirogiannis disconsolately. Meanwhile, Norskov—notably, a woman—approaches the work with more optimism; the “fragments are really fantastic small pieces of handicraft,” that allow her to feel close to the original people who made them. Foregrounding what is recovered, rather than what is lost, Norskov aks: what if “the object could tell the story”.
Brennan’s films do not draw conclusions about, or moral judgements towards, the tombaroliand in Siticulosa, the story becomes theirs. Drawing from interviews she conducted with anonymous members, Brennan layers the tombaroli’s words over the moving image; although they aren’t visible on screen, their words ring the loudest. Phrases like “WHEN I LOOK AT THE LANDSCAPE I SEE BENEATH IT” or “WE THOUGHT THE VASES GREW FROM THE SOIL”, are presented in the middle of the screen in stark capitalised sentences, as if pertaining to a kind of ancient lore. But they also speak profoundly to the contradictions of western imperialist acquisition. Who is it that fills the museums? they ask.
Dawn. A crescent-nail moon; low diaphanous clouds marauding the plains, a solitary hillside. A very low thrum, like the bass of a party way off in the distance, or a low powered motor. A young man on foot scales the rugged terrain—stones and olive groves. His horse—or a horse—gallops and canters freely by his side. In Siticulosa, we scale the Puglian landscape, bringing the tombaroli into conversation with the other voices that attend to it: a generational farmer, an antique dealer, an art historian, a PhD researcher. Each of them is implicated in this landscape and what goes on beneath, demonstrating how our relationship to the underworld, and afterlife, is—like the tombaroli’s—ambivalent, complicated, sometimes even complicit. “There is enormous solidarity underground,” says the farmer of his networked system of olive groves, while the antique dealer describes how each piece of land hides something. As the daughter of an antiques dealer, I bore witness to discrepancies around provenance and the crimes committed against it. For Brennan, looking at these things head-on becomes a form of reparation concerned less with the recovery of material objects and more with the uncovering of cultural theft, and Europe's underground network that continues to enable it.
Sun cracks through the branches of an olive tree; bounces off the chaff and grasses, bleached stones and fallen columns. The man and the horse, two dark and unidentifiable silhouettes, traverse the terrain, carrying the story of Siticulosa—a story of stories. I imagine their hooves and soles skimming over the tombs—tombs that are not sealed in perpetuity but, like scars, might one day be reopened.
Rose Higham-Stainton writes about gender and art-making and more recently, through her work as a vegetable grower, environmental and agrarian practices. She has written criticism and essays for Flash Art, LA Review of Books, ArtReview, TANK, Texte zur Kunst, The White Review, Art Monthly, Bricks from the Kiln and Worms Magazine. Rose has contributed to artists's monographs for the likes of Amy Sillman, Lynda Benglis and Studio Morison, and to art books published by Phaidon. Her debut book Limn the Distance was published in 2023 by JOAN. Rose also runs the event series and ongoing project FENWOMEN, which gathers women, non-binary and trans writers from across East Anglia and invites others in.
This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the programme ‘Siticulosa’ at Barbican Cinema, 6 May 2025.
In An Excavation, made several years before Siticulosa, we begin at the end. Or rather, with what remains: the fragments of a vase recovered from Geneva Freeport in 2014, part of 45 crates of antiquities that have been sold, transported, washed like money, bereft of provenance, born again but different. A pair of archaeologists—Dr. Christos Tsirogiannis and Dr. Vinnie Norskov—are tasked with looking for criminal evidence of the looters and unwrap the decorative terracotta fragments like gifts. Beatrice Dillon’s delicate score for the Kanun, a traditional Middle Eastern instrument (played here by Kostantinos Glynos), is intercut with the faint shrill of fired earth reverberating against the archaeologists’ fingers, their nails, and the hard surface of their work bench. They turn and inspect each fragment and attempt to fit them back together according to an original pictorial composition. There, a wing of Eros. Here, Persephone.
The story—for there is always a story—goes like this: one day Persephone, daughter of Zeus and Demeter, is out picking flowers with her mother (the goddess of agriculture) when she’s abducted by Hades (god of the underworld). Hades makes Persephone his queen, and Demeter is heartbroken, so Zeus brokers a deal with Hades: for half the year, Persephone will live in the underworld with Hades, the other half, above ground, with her loving mother. The ancient Greeks believed that this created the seasons: when Demeter was parted from her child, all of earth withered into autumn and winter; when Persephone returned to her mother, the earth rejoiced and was brought back to life.
Both Brennan’s films attend to the brink space between under and over—what is dead and what is alive. They challenge a contemporary onus towards upward growth and mobility by bringing these subterranean riches to the surface.
And by ‘rich’, I mean—rich with information. An Excavation dwells not only on the antiquities but on the materials that were recovered with them, closing in on the Antiquities Trade Gazette (1990 edition) repurposed as wrapping material, the looter’s polaroids, FRAGILE labels, cardboard boxes, padding. “We will never be able to reconstruct the specific history of that person that was buried here,” says Tsirogiannis disconsolately. Meanwhile, Norskov—notably, a woman—approaches the work with more optimism; the “fragments are really fantastic small pieces of handicraft,” that allow her to feel close to the original people who made them. Foregrounding what is recovered, rather than what is lost, Norskov aks: what if “the object could tell the story”.
Brennan’s films do not draw conclusions about, or moral judgements towards, the tombaroliand in Siticulosa, the story becomes theirs. Drawing from interviews she conducted with anonymous members, Brennan layers the tombaroli’s words over the moving image; although they aren’t visible on screen, their words ring the loudest. Phrases like “WHEN I LOOK AT THE LANDSCAPE I SEE BENEATH IT” or “WE THOUGHT THE VASES GREW FROM THE SOIL”, are presented in the middle of the screen in stark capitalised sentences, as if pertaining to a kind of ancient lore. But they also speak profoundly to the contradictions of western imperialist acquisition. Who is it that fills the museums? they ask.
Dawn. A crescent-nail moon; low diaphanous clouds marauding the plains, a solitary hillside. A very low thrum, like the bass of a party way off in the distance, or a low powered motor. A young man on foot scales the rugged terrain—stones and olive groves. His horse—or a horse—gallops and canters freely by his side. In Siticulosa, we scale the Puglian landscape, bringing the tombaroli into conversation with the other voices that attend to it: a generational farmer, an antique dealer, an art historian, a PhD researcher. Each of them is implicated in this landscape and what goes on beneath, demonstrating how our relationship to the underworld, and afterlife, is—like the tombaroli’s—ambivalent, complicated, sometimes even complicit. “There is enormous solidarity underground,” says the farmer of his networked system of olive groves, while the antique dealer describes how each piece of land hides something. As the daughter of an antiques dealer, I bore witness to discrepancies around provenance and the crimes committed against it. For Brennan, looking at these things head-on becomes a form of reparation concerned less with the recovery of material objects and more with the uncovering of cultural theft, and Europe's underground network that continues to enable it.
Sun cracks through the branches of an olive tree; bounces off the chaff and grasses, bleached stones and fallen columns. The man and the horse, two dark and unidentifiable silhouettes, traverse the terrain, carrying the story of Siticulosa—a story of stories. I imagine their hooves and soles skimming over the tombs—tombs that are not sealed in perpetuity but, like scars, might one day be reopened.
Rose Higham-Stainton writes about gender and art-making and more recently, through her work as a vegetable grower, environmental and agrarian practices. She has written criticism and essays for Flash Art, LA Review of Books, ArtReview, TANK, Texte zur Kunst, The White Review, Art Monthly, Bricks from the Kiln and Worms Magazine. Rose has contributed to artists's monographs for the likes of Amy Sillman, Lynda Benglis and Studio Morison, and to art books published by Phaidon. Her debut book Limn the Distance was published in 2023 by JOAN. Rose also runs the event series and ongoing project FENWOMEN, which gathers women, non-binary and trans writers from across East Anglia and invites others in.
This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the programme ‘Siticulosa’ at Barbican Cinema, 6 May 2025.