An Excavation 
Maeve Brennan | 2022 | UK | 20’ | Digital | English spoken 

An Excavation begins with text on screen: “In 2014, 45 crates of looted antiquities were discovered at Geneva Freeport. Three of the crates, containing 32 cardboard boxes, were sent to archaeologists to search for criminal evidence.” What follows over the course of the next twenty minutes is the meticulous reconstruction of an ancient vase – “object 16” – pieced back together from fragments that were likely contained across several of the recovered cardboard boxes. The two archaeologists at work, Dr. Christos Tsirogiannis and Dr. Vinnie Norskov, are not only reconstituting an object; they are also piecing together the evidence of a crime – like forensic detectives in a murder scene.  

Siticulosa 
Maeve Brennan | 2025 | UK, Denmark | 45’ | Digital | Italian spoken, English subtitles 

After a series of projects forensically examining the largely illicit international antiquities market, Brennan turns her meticulous gaze to the landscape the looted objects in An Excavation were extracted from in Southern Italy. Siticulosa’s multidisciplinary research considers the relationship between archaeology, geology and agriculture in the Puglian landscape. “Parched” or “very dry”, as in Horace’s description of the region (Siticulosa Apulia), continues to be an accurate description of the dominant conditions that allow for the appearance of crop marks to indicate the presence of archaeological sites beneath. The film is a study of a territory, and the marks and wounds that it bears of a history of pillage, but also a portrait of the people that inhabit it (farmers, antique dealers, amateur archaeologists, local historians) and their symbiotic relationship to the landscape.  

Followed by a Q&A with Maeve Brennan.