The CAS project After Discourse: Things, Archaeology, and Heritage in the 21st Century welcomes you to a Friday seminar at CAS Oslo. 

Friday March 10,  Hein B. Bjerck will give the paper "Charred memories – ephemeral survivors in my uncle’s burnt home". The seminar is open to all interested.

About the speaker

Hein B. Bjerck is head of NTNU’s study program in archaeology and member of the After Discourse group at CAS.

Besides contemporary archaeology, his is main academic focus is Stone Age studies - ranging from lithic traditions, phenomenological perspectives on cave paintings to international studies of early human-sea relation and colonization processes in seascapes.

He is the leader of “Marine Ventures” – a comparative study of marine foragers in the seascapes of Scandinavia and Argentinean Patagonia. His interests in the recent past departs from his time as Cultural Heritage Officer at the Governor of Svalbard in 1996-1999, where he was involved in managing modern ruins – derelict settlements, mining enterprises, base camps from scientific expeditions.

This interest was nourished along with art photographer Elin Andreassen and Bjørnar Olsen in the Pyramiden project that produced the book Persistent Memories – a Soviet mining town in the High Arctic (2010).

He was a member of the Ruin Memories project, where he contributed with a close-up study of the home of his deceased father, “My Father’s Things” (Ruin Memories anthology, 2014), “Back in Pyramiden” and “Managing the scars of terror” about the material remains from the 22. July terror in Oslo. His main interest is material memory in small, intimate, and personal things.