In etymology, tumulus denotes an earth mound over a prehistoric tomb. In Turkish, it is called Tümülüs, Höyük, and Kurgan, terms also common in Central Asia. In the UK, a tumulus is called a cairn, which is a Gaelic term meaning 'heap of stones' (2007). Beyond the archaeological value of an ancient grave of an affluent family, this project focuses on field notes that address the multispecies entanglement and ecosemiotics of tumuli as fluid landscapes incorporating elements of queer ecology, archaeology, and cyberfeminist web archaeology. This project addresses the key research questions: How can queer ecology trouble colonial web/ archaeology through art practice? How can the multi-sensory field practice undo colonial web/archaeology and re-encode queer ecology-embodied practice in the cyber/tumulus landscape/s? Can digital platforms, informed by queer, cyberfeminist principles, be used to create new forms of knowledge through art practice that foster ecological awareness and promote inclusive, multispecies kinship? How does Space Tumulus project pay attention to the future web archaeology ‘ecopoetically’ as a world-building practice?
To address these questions, I developed a research methodology, un/digging, drawing on Karen Barad's Undoing the Future (2016), that counters colonial archaeology, which has historically legitimised colonialism and perpetuates sexist and racist narratives (e.g., phrenology). Rather than colonial archaeology’s practices of digging, iv disturbing, destroying, misinterpreting, and misrepresenting past life forms, un/digging is enacted through embodied, multisensory field notes collected at prehistoric tumuli in Scotland and Türkiye, these include observation, seeding, walking, and multimedia recording, alongside olfactory and auditory sensory engagement. The field notes are subsequently reinterpreted in physical/cyberspace, utilising ecopoetic narratives crafted with ASCII, GIF, HTML and CSS. Un/digging is informed by Indigenous archaeology as a decolonising and queering practice and extends to web archaeology through Indigenous futurism, a cyberfeminism subgenre that forms and informs the Space Tumulus (ST) website.
For this practice-based research, I developed ST 'handmade web', informed by J.R. Carpenter's poetic web (2015), incorporating intersectionality, queer ecology, archaeology, and web archaeology. For Un/digging ST project, I employ methods and techniques that contrast with the traditional archaeological method of 'digging'. Multisensory eco-semiotic field notes are collected or grown, including mycelium, natural fibres, seeds, and olfactory and sonic stimuli, representing the temporality of the entangled spacetime garden and grave in the tumulus cybersite. The collected field notes are located on the ST website, which functions as a platform for disseminating and discussing research findings through embodied queer, Indigenous, ecopoetic narratives. These future-present eco-facts and grave goods speak to death, decay, time, and space across material and immaterial temporalities.
Ultimately, this transdisciplinary research contributes to contemporary art by demonstrating how art practice can trouble the extractive legacies of colonial archaeology. By translating tangible ecofacts into a handmade cyber-sanctuary, the research finds that ST website prompts the audience to consider whether the sensorial qualities of ecofact memory can surpass mediums, igniting awareness of our profound relationship to the landscape. The project reveals that through the principles of permacomputing, a queer ecology can be maintained as a world-building practice—a future-present archive in cyberspace that honours the entangled temporalities of life, death, and more-than-human kin through love, care, and intra-action.
