(IN)TANGIBLE HERITAGE(S)
Abstract
Matter of the Manor explores alternative ways to engage with the re-inhabitation of historic places in order to include the forceful emotional affect that these sites elicit in their surrounding communities. The project uses Wymering Manor, a 16th Century house in Cosham, Portsmouth, UK, as a case study to examine the ways in which subjective experiences and emotions can be represented in the future of city making. The house provides a space of cultural and historical ‘affect’ in the middle of a suburban setting where local people are invited to engage through volunteering or as an audience member to one of its varied events. The volunteers are drawn into the house looking to connect with others, with history and the pleasure of being in a historic building. Through the collective daily acts and the physical poetics of hoovering, taking tours, dusting, making tea and decorating they embody the manor; as a result of repetition of these gestures the house becomes part of those that visit it. The richness of its surfaces, the smell of damp, the crumbling timber and dust made by larvae beetle slowly eating away at its core all create an overwhelming sense of affect. New digital technologies are used to rethink the tangible and intangible effects of the house and create magical transitions between the body, imagination and place. The house heads in a new direction without a fixed plan or future but one where the many voices of the volunteers and its non-human inhabitants effect its many potential futures. It creates a vehicle to re-think architectural production and practices and develops a space to include the everyday longings and desires of the communities in the future of cities, to form resilience through actions of care and found magic.
Maggie Bowers’ research is located within the fields of postcolonial and North American writing. Having focussed her undergraduate studies on American literature, she specialised in Canadian women’s writing for her MA and then multi-ethnic women’s writing for her Phd. she taught at the University of Kent and the University of Antwerp before coming to Portsmouth. Bowers has also worked for Wasafiri (the journal for international contemporary writing) and the European Commission. She has published on magical realism, Indian women’s writing in English, African American women’s writing, Asian American writing, and Native American writing. She has a particular interest in the intersections of narrative form, ritualistic and political aspects of literature.
Belinda Mitchell’s work focuses on drawing as a critical and gendered means for understanding interior space. Her research takes place through interdisciplinary processes and her current work engages with Wymering Manor, a 16th century house in Cosham, where she has developed experimental heritage practices to represent the intangible qualities of historic settings. Recent publications include Matter of the Manor (2018) Journal of Interior Design, Wiley, Thresholds of the Future (2019) Interior Futures, Crucible USA and Drawing IN: Bodies in Motion (2022) Remote Practices, Architecture at a Distance, Lund Humphries. Recently she exhibited at the Espacio Gallery, London with degrees of freedom, in Osmosis (2022) a collaborative exhibition with artists working at the intersection of language, place and materiality, and she was shortlisted in the Architectural Drawing Prize, hybrid drawing category, at the World Architecture Festival 2022.
9:00 am - 10:30 am
Thursday 16th June, 2022