VIRTUAL London Heritages Conference
Abstract
Latent Connections is part of a longer-term research creation project entitled Cultural Alignments. Cultural Alignments examines what is in common(s) between World Heritage Sites. In this paper, we research how sites like the Basque whaling station at Red Bay, and the Viking settlement at l’Anse aux Meadow problematize Canada’s dominant colonial narrative. To position this research, it uses the lens described by Jorge Otero-Pailos, when he writes that the old is always open for interpretation, and that this interpretation cannot finish. As a research creation project, it makes a series of open-ended cartographs linking UNESCO World Heritage Sites through space and time. These connections are considered latent because they fall outside the definitions of established heritage characteristics. These might how heritage sites exploit similar material, intellectual, and environmental resources – how maritime resources brought both Vikings and later Basque peoples to Canadian shores. To conclude, we explore the resultant cartographs as a commons. This commons is relational and connected; it forms a narrative of heritage that everyone can draw from. It does not imagine sites as discrete, but part of a latent field that binds many places together, in many layered ways. Therefore, Latent Connections aims to pry heritage open in new ways, to reveal new relations, to defy conventional categories; to see how site near and far, have more in common than convention would deem otherwise.
Johan Voordouw is an Associate Professor at Carleton University, Ottawa. Prior to his appointment, he taught in the UK and worked in professional practice. Johan’s research interests are varied, but broadly use research creation methods to examine questions of housing, the domestic, heritage and environment.