The Mexican artist’s new exhibition uses Roman detritus to suggest that we can tell more about a society by what it throws out than the culture it preserves
When Mariana Castillo Deball was invited to create an exhibition responding to the Roman relics in London’s Mithraeum collection, it was its local quality and patchy treatment that first struck her. “It’s the opposite of the British Museum, where artefacts have been taken in suspicious circumstances from all over the world,” she says. “In Europe, we sometimes forget that we have a history that can be exhibited.”
Notoriously, mid-century London’s cultural custodians didn’t cover themselves in glory when it came to what many hailed as the capital’s most exciting archaeological discovery. Unearthed in 1954, the Temple of Mithras quickly captured the city’s imagination. This underground building dedicated to Mithras the Bull Slayer, deity of a mysterious soldiers’ cult, was central to the original Londinium settlement along the Thames. Yet in spite of heated press coverage, and Winston Churchill’s endorsement, its treasures were then dispersed – or even thrown away – while the building was haphazardly reconstructed in 1962 on the top of a car park roof. Today it’s been carefully recreated at the bottom of the Bloomberg skyscraper, at the original site where archaeologists have since found many other ancient artefacts.
