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Ben Timberlake

@ben.timberlake_

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Archaeologist.
Co-founder Jonah X Projects.
Literary rep: [email protected]
Speaking: [email protected]

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Paperback out now!

High Risk: A True Story of the SAS, Drugs and other Bad Behaviour.

From the inside cover:

Ben Timberlake has spent a lifetime in pursuit of the ultimate rush. This is an account of his near-execution in wartime Yugoslavia, his time in the SAS, combat in Iraq, encounters with a gambling-obsessed 9/11 hijacker, veterans blissed out on MDMA, as well as exploring hook-ups in the world of extreme sex and battling a heroin habit on a remote Scottish island. In this pilgrimage on the road of excess Ben looks at the social, biological, religious and personal factors that drive people to the edge and has a whole lot of fun along the way.

The why? As Mallory said of Everest, ‘Because it’s there.’ In Ben’s case, there was no risk too high or gutter too low.

Like a cross between Jason Bourne and Anthony Bourdain, this is Kitchen Confidential for the War on Terror.
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Key words: #war, #neuroscience, #archaeology, #drugs, #addiction, #terrorism, #exploration, #posttraumaticgrowth.
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Or, for those of you who prefer acronyms:
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#WOT #WTF? #SAS #SF #USMC #AQI #NO-GI #FUBAR #PTSD #PTG #MDMA #BDSM #IV #NA #LOLS by @ben.timberlake_

Please go and see ‘Painting the French Riviera’ at the Royal Academy. It’s an incredible collection of great artists as they try and capture the wild blues of the Côte d’Azur. Monet said it was like “swimming in blue air,” while Derain wrote that the cerulean hues were like “sticks of dynamite….primed to discharge light.”

To Yves Klein blue represented the sky and sea, but also cosmic energy and total freedom. Klein is our kinda guy. @bellapollen @sara_helene_fuchs @ben.timberlake_ @semper_andrea @simonbuxton by @ben.timberlake_

Project Blue was invited to show its photos of the Sar-e-Sang lapis mines at the inaugural Kyoto YouMe Triennale. YouMe is a new international exhibition of art, design and craft,co- founded by the visionary Andrea Petochi, managing Director of Liberty, London and set in Shosei-en, the National Scenic Garden of Higashi Honganji, and Shigenobu Kaikan, a beautiful 1930’s building.

Curators from the UK , Italy, India, Qatar, and Japan staged shows.

Si Buxton’s photographs depicted Project Blue’s three day journey from Kabul to the epic mountains of Badakshan, the source of Ultramarine, the first True Blue.

From the symbol and typography to the exhibition graphics and catalogue, every element of the Triennale was designed to express the same underlying philosophy: that art and craft and design are most meaningful when they come together through making, conversation and collaboration.
#ProjectBlue @bellapollen @sara_helene_fuchs @ben.timberlake_ @simonbuxton @semper_andrea by @ben.timberlake_

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Project Blue was invited by Andrea Petochi to the Kyōto YouMe Triennale to exhibit the photography of Simon Buxton. That’s Andrea, on the left in the second slide; Si is to the right. Andrea is MD of Liberty and chair at the British Museum Company and one of the founders of the Kyōto YouMe Triennale. Si is a great photographer who travelled to the Sar-e-Sang lapis lazuli mine in Badakhshan, Afghanistan, last year. The exhibition is a record of that trip.

We spent a week in Kyoto and met up with artists and other creative folk in one of the most stunning locations in Kyoto: the Shōseien Garden and nearby Buddhist School. Project Blue is raising money for different heritage projects across the whole of Afghanistan but we are very keen to celebrate its Buddhist past and so it felt particularly resonant to be exhibiting in such a space of spiritual learning and beauty. If you are in Japan this week then I urge you to visit.

I’m going to leave you with the photographs of Simon Buxton and the words of Alessandro Biamonti who wrote the manifesto for YouMe:

‘In this age of advancing AI, we must pause and take a deep, collective breath, as if the whole planet is doing so with us. We need to re-examine the very meaning of existence. What lies beyond our chain of joy, fear, anxiety and heartbreak?

This is an invitation to a great challenge, one with no right or wrong answers. Sometimes it is easier not to ask, like a bird in a cage, swaying between seed and water. Outside, there may be hundreds of dangerous predators. But we may also be afraid to discover there are forests to build nests in, and places to ride the wind on a long journey.

Regardless of what we choose to see or who we are, the sun still rises in the east and sets in the west, and a warm spring always follows a cold winter.

Here, quality is not about perfect products. It is the silent, unspoken value that lives in our relationships and in the creative process itself — beyond the cold logic of profit. We choose Kyoto because it is a place where deep history and bold modernity intersect: the act of making is imbued with a soul, and its heritage is still breathing.’ by @ben.timberlake_

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Trials and Tribulations

I saw this in a friend’s gallery (@jeronimo6320) early last summer but didn’t buy it right away. A few weeks later I was at a prison for ISIS badasses in the Middle East and kept thinking about the artefact. The sun was nudging 50c in the shade and the prisoners moved around in the flickering heat like Bruegel’s subjects. I was bored and texted my friend to buy it.

‘It’ is a tribulum, which gives us the word tribulation. I’d always assumed that a tribulation was a good thing, like the opposite of a trial, highs’n’lows. But I recognise that I’m prone to novelty-seeking behaviour and assume most things I don’t understand probably involve fun. Or maybe just because it sounded like jubilation.

But a tribulum - or threshing-sledge - is no party. It is a ‘living fossil’ of an artefact from the twilight of Stone Age and the beginnings of agriculture. Its teeth are made of razor-sharp, knapped flints, set in hard wood. It is designed to be dragged by an animal over harvested wheat to separate the grain from the husk. In Christian eschatology, “The Great Tribulation” refers to a prophesied period of intense chaos, suffering, and divine wrath on Earth preceding the End Times. So a good reason for a party. by @ben.timberlake_

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Giacometti at The Temple of Dendur, Metropolitan Museum, NYC.

Giacometti was fascinated with archaeology throughout his life and the graceful figures in Egyptian art made a huge impression on him.

Foundation Giacometti and the Met have collaborated to put 14 bronze and plaster works in this incredible space.

The Temple of Dendur was completed in 10 BCE as a commission by Caesar Augustus shortly after he became emperor of Rome. It was gifted from Egypt to the United States in 1965. by @ben.timberlake_

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Thank you to Vanessa Barboni for hosting a dinner for Project Blue. Thank you as well to Joseph at Atelier Jolie for looking after us. To Ruby Bailey for a great documentary. And lastly to Basir Shakeri at Eat Offbeat for giving the evening true soul. by @ben.timberlake_

Provence 3 by @ben.timberlake_

Provence 2 by @ben.timberlake_

Provence 1 by @ben.timberlake_

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The Alhambra, Granada’s breathtaking “red fortress,” began as a 9th-century citadel before the Nasrid sultans — the last Muslim dynasty in Iberia — transformed it into a palace city of extraordinary refinement: a pearl, their poets called it, set in emeralds. Water channelled from the Sierra Nevada still feeds its fountains today. by @ben.timberlake_

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The Great Umayyad Mosque is one of the most layered sacred sites in the world, its foundations reaching back through millennia of continuous worship. The site originally housed an Aramaean temple dedicated to the deity Hadad, which was rededicated to Zeus during the Hellenistic period, then transformed by the Romans into the Temple of Jupiter Damascenus in the first century BCE, and finally converted by Emperor Theodosius into the Christian Cathedral of Saint John in 391 CE.

Damascus became the first major Byzantine city to fall to the early Muslim conquests in 634 CE, after which the Great Mosque was built between 705 and 715 CE by Caliph al-Walid I, representing a major milestone in the development of early Islamic art, drawing strongly on the artistic traditions of late-antique Syria and the influence of Byzantine and Sassanid aesthetics.

Al-Walid proclaimed to the people of Damascus: “To your climate, your water, your fruits, and your baths, I add a fifth superiority: this mosque.”

Remarkably, the mosque has survived the Syrian Civil War relatively unscathed and remains one of Islam’s holiest and architecturally most significant monuments.

In the early morning and late afternoon, the marble floor of the courtyard, polished by the soles of countless faithful, reflects the light like a tranquil lake. by @ben.timberlake_