Sunday, May 31st, 2020, 1pm

Introduced by Dr. Eric Blinman, Director, New Mexico Office of Archeological Studies
with special guest Dr. Marvin Rowe, New Mexico Office of Archeological Studies and winner of the Fryxell Award for Interdisciplinary Research

Rock art—ancient paintings and engravings on rock surfaces—is a visual record of global human history. The international collective Adventure of Rock Art protects and celebrates this shared heritage. Through their work, we remember how rock art links us to powerful ancestral worlds and magnificent landscapes of the past, tells the story of the birthplaces of art, the dawn of artistic endeavors, creates connections to significant places and depicts encounters with the surrounding living world. This conversation with members of the collective follows a screening of a magnificent new film, The Final Passage is exploring the famed Chauvet-Pont d’Arc Cave, whose steady development approaches the experience of the first men who spent time in the cave 36,000 years ago. An uncut sequence-shot filmed with a subjective camera allows us to discover in an immersive manner one of the greatest sites of human history. Lions, mammoths, rhinos, bears and half-human, half-animal figures come to life in this never-before-seen, hyper-realistic digital reproduction.

Guest speaker: Jean-Michel Geneste (Associate Producer, Scientific Advisor, The Adventure of Rock Art) is a French archaeologist and Honorary Curator of Cultural Heritage. He was the curator of Lascaux Cave and then director of the Centre National de Préhistoire, a laboratory of the Ministry of Culture dedicated to the study of Rock Art. From 2002 to 2017, he was the director of research for the Chauvet Cave, one of the oldest rock art sites in Western Europe. He will be familiar to many cinema fans as the scientist who shows us how to throw a spear in Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams. He was a consultant on The Final Passage.

Guest speaker: Carolyn Boyd, the Shumla Endowed Research Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Texas State University, is the founder of a nonprofit organization, Shumla Archaeological Research and Education Center (www.shumla.org), established in 1998 to preserve the oldest known “books” in North America— the rock art of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands in southwest Texas and Coahuila, Mexico. She is author of Rock Art of the Lower Pecos (2003) and The White Shaman Mural: An Enduring Creation Narrative (2016).

Guest speaker and host: Martin Marquet is an independent producer and publicity veteran who has worked with Jane Campion, Joel and Ethan Cohen, Harmony Korine, Gaspar Noé, Bruce Beresford, James Marsh, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Studio Ghibli and many more. He has helped bring the restored works of Alejandro Jodorowsky and Jacques Tati into the public eye. Marquet has concurrently worked in the spheres of archeology, with a focus on pre-historical rock art. With a team of interactive designers, architects, and 3D engineers, he’s currently developing an international exhibition of a selection of rock art panels listed by UNESCO as World Class Heritage Sites, in the project The Adventure of Rock Art. Marquet films as producer include Marie Losier’s The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, Hubert Sauper’s Epicentro, winner of a Grand Jury Prize at Sundance 2020, and Kirsten Johnson’s upcoming Camerapeople of the 21st Century.

How to attend this online event:

• Sign up by clicking here.
• You'll get a link to stream the film via e-mail. Watch the film prior to the event.
• The Center for Contemporary Arts will send you a link to the Zoom Q&A event on Saturday, May 30th.