IN-PERSON ISTANBUL HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

This paper discusses a practice led research project exploring the interconnected nature of walking, photographic practice and digital navigation systems as a form of drawing. Working within these interdisciplinary methods , I ask how might photography, GPS technologies and walking be used to read the complex and accumulating histories the heritage site. The practice documents the sites and pathways of St Bede’s pilgrim trail bracketed by the twin monasteries of St Paul’s and St Peters in the northeast England. Using historic, archival data , found sources of information en-route and my own generative artistic practice, I examine the co-construction of narratives concerning the sites social and religious history which, I argue, derives from many agents, Bede’s historical inscriptions and the heritage sector as a re-reading and overwriting of the sites history. These often, differentiated perspectives are re-formulated by my role as the contemporary walking artist as psychogeographer. Drawing from Soja’s ‘Third space theory’ of differentiated and hybrid spaces, I aim to explain and contextualize the relationships between representation, the immersive experience and its ontological implications for the re reading the heritage site as a ‘palimpsest’ a ‘co-existence of many layers originated at different times and superimposed, one upon the other’ (Harvey , 2014) By re positioning historical narratives within the edges of the contemporary urban sites contingent to the trail involves a re-thinking of the heritage site as a lived experience, one which embraces somatic, perceptual, existential, architectural and cognitive spaces (Tilley, 1994) in its re-formulation of sedimented meanings.