Expanded Interiors: Bringing contemporary site-specific fine-art practice to Roman houses at Herculaneum and Pompeii.

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Expanded Interiors is an interdisciplinary research project that draws site-specific contemporary fine art practice into a unique dialogue with ancient Roman wall paintings and architectural remains at the UNESCO World Heritage Sites of Herculaneum and Pompeii. For the first time it brings together the practice-led research of visual artist, Catrin Huber, with the disciplinary perspectives and expertise of archaeologists, art historians, and digital technologists. The project is delivered in partnership with the Soprintendenza Pompei and the Herculaneum Conservation Project. With 2.5 million annual visitors to Pompeii alone, this collaboration offers an amazing opportunity to bring site-specific fine art practice and interdisciplinary archaeological research to a large and international public audience.The Expanded Interiors research inserts itself within a particular set of archaeological explorations around Roman architecture and interiors. By focusing on wall paintings it asks questions about the place, purpose and design of Roman houses: in particular how these paintings negotiated public and private space and how they related to objects within the home. While these questions have been explored by some academics this is the first time such issues have been brought together with contemporary site-specific fine art practice or with the aim of exploring new digital approaches to the display of archaeological artefacts at open air heritage sites. Through archaeological and fine-art based investigation and 3D digital scanning and printing Expanded Interiors will generate and present site-specific installations within two Roman houses, the Casa del Bel Cortile at Herculaneum and the Casa dei Criptoportico at Pompeii. In doing so it will establish a bridge between the ancient methods and skills of the Roman wall painter and those used within contemporary fine art practice, providing new insights and understandings of these two different creative worlds.We expect that the research findings and outputs generated through Expanded Interiors will be of interest to an international academic and practitioner audience that crosses the boundaries of archaeology, contemporary fine art practice, art history, museums and heritage. We will engage with these audiences through a variety of outputs and channels. A major two-day international symposium will be held at Herculaneum, during the exhibition period, which will open up our research questions and findings to an audience of artists, conservationists, historians, art historians, classicists, and archaeologists. A monograph print publication, comprising documentation of the installations and the research process and a series of newly commissioned essays, will also be produced. Published by Art Editions North this book is aimed at an international contemporary arts readership. The Expanded Interiors research will also be publicly disseminated through a project website, and through conference papers and published articles in academic and professional journals within the fields of contemporary art, archaeology, heritage and museums studies.This is a public-facing research project that will have benefit far beyond academia. Through the on-site installations it will impact directly on the visitor audience at Herculaneum and Pompeii providing a novel opportunity to enhance and enliven the visitor experience at these two sites. By experimenting with new and innovative ways of presenting ancient buildings and objects on-site the project suggests potential new approaches to archaeological display that could be taken up and developed at other heritage sites and museum contexts. In particular it offers new understandings of the possibilities of site-specific art as a platform for public engagement with archaeology and new insights into the feasibility of the creative use of 3-D technologies within open-air museum display.