When it came to reconstructing the five Viking ships deliberately sunk at Skuldelev in Denmark's Roskilde Fjord, the archaeologists in charge of the project didn't call on the services of naval carpenters. In the spirit of experimental archaeology, they wanted the boats to be built by people with a minimum of technical prejudice. Carpenters who, through trial and error, would discover how to build a drakkar with the tools available around the year 1000. Once the boats were built, the next step was to sail them to understand how they behaved in open sea conditions. An experienced crew sailed from Roskilde to Dublin using oars and wind power. Experimental archaeology continues the speculative enterprise of classical archaeology, but fills the gap between the discovery of artifacts and their conservation by following the lines of manufacture and use. It replaces a theory of experience with a practice of experience. This raises a host of questions that had not been envisaged at the outset, the resolution of which in turn feeds our knowledge of these objects of the past

The conditions of experimental archaeology seem to me interesting to relate to the Red Orange project, which I've been familiar with from several angles for over a decade. It's not a question of simply adapting the practices developed by the artists to a new context, but rather of observing how a radically different context can modify the artists' relationship to their own practice. In my view, this pivoting is one of the project's most exciting interests, and often gives rise to singular creations that the artist is free to relate to the rest of his or her production, or not.

Just as the archaeologists at the Viking Ship Museum didn't call on carpenters specializing in shipbuilding, I sought to work with artists who claimed other skills, be it graphic design, theoretical production, curating, radio etc., in order to break further away from what is currently understood as their artistic practice. This was to give me the opportunity to break further away from what is currently understood as their artistic practice.

While our navigations are finely observed, our profiles are drawn up in ever finer detail, our interests are determined before we are even able to formulate them, and we are offered encounters that only serve to calcify our certainties. Let's cross the field.
At a time when we're more interested in the speaker than in what he or she has to say, when our impulses are dissected as implicit constructions that reproduce power structures, let's cut through the woods.