Archaeologist, author and artist. Cities of Lost Memory brings together historical research, visual memory and drawing.
Alexandre Mitchell is an archaeologist, author and artist. Born in Oxford in 1974 to a British father and a French mother, he grew up in Flanders and Brussels before studying in Strasbourg and Oxford. His research in classical archaeology has taken him widely abroad, and for more than twenty years he has taught, published and lectured on Greek and Roman archaeology and visual culture.
Drawing has long been part of his archaeological practice, but it developed into a sustained creative practice during the Covid period. In Cities of Lost Memory, the habits of the researcher and the freedom of the artist come together: each work grows out of historical investigation, museum collections, travel, sketching and conversations with specialists before taking form in Indian ink.
Academic research, publications and conferences · alexmitchell.net ↗Research, notebooks, composition, Indian ink and lithography: the making of the drawings is a long process in which archaeological method and visual invention continually push against one another.
Explore the artistic process →The project moves between archaeology, historical memory and the present. Each drawing has its own dossier, sources, sketches, exhibition history and visual genealogy.
Explore the works →History is researched before it is drawn — but the finished image must still be allowed to become something else.
