An Excavation

This new film is part of a multidisciplinary project from artist Maeve Brennan that sets out a careful study into the international traffic of looted antiquities – the focus here is on a series of 4th century BCE Italian vases discovered in a trove of seized crates at Geneva Freeport in 2014.

The vases were illegally excavated from their resting place by tomb robbers. The film centres around the unpacking and study of these artefacts by forensic archaeologists Dr Christos Tsirogiannis and Dr Vinnie Norskov. The history of these objects and their journey through the illegal trade of antiquities is unravelled through a discussion between the investigators as they position the artefacts within a wider discourse of the infiltration of organised crime networks in archaeology.