Disinter/est: digging up our childhood. Authenticity, ambiguity and failure in the auto/biography of the infant self

This chapter is an equal collaboration between Joshua Sofaer and Joanna Sofaer, brother and sister, artist and archaeologist. Their joint research project commenced in 2001 with a Year of the Artist commission from Eastern Arts (formerly Eastern Arts Board) and manifest in a performance lecture and installation at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge between March and May of that year. The Disinter/est project challenges traditional notions of autobiography based on experiential narrative by focussing on infancy, a time about which we remember nothing. Returning to Cambridge, the place of their joint infancy, they used archaeological practice to investigate spaces they then inhabited. Sofaer and Sofaer ask us to rethink the relationship between self and autobiography and to consider infancy as a period that permits an exploration of the self as other; a biography of the self that is an intersubjective, rather than individual, construction.
Portfolio: Biographies and Space: Placing the Subject in Art and Architecture.