Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

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I will present the artworks I have made as practice led research into represented place, explore how this representation affects our understanding of heritage sites and of their lived experience. In the creation of a body of work – installations, a newspaper and a radio play, I have restructured the architecture of this “kaleidoscopic simultaneity of fragments” to understand this architecture of the imagination. Park Hill Flats, Sheffield, UK is a seminal city-symphonic character, iconic post-war slum clearance and Cité radieuse parkland-set housing project conceived from the beginning as ‘picture architecture’ intended to change housing conditions but re-present this grimy industrial city. As much a protagonist in these images as any of its residents, Park Hill has continued to reflect the narrative of socialist utopia become crime scene now destined for a regenerated public/private future. Although Park Hill has been subject of much critique, the use of visual images throughout its history have received little academic attention. Using Jill Stoner’s notion of a ‘Minor Architecture’, Park Hill’s extensive planning records become a site of myriad voices and overlooked lived experiences and I have traced impact of these images and the role they play in the creation of new places. For example, developers’ prospectuses both recycle images of Park Hill’s utopian mid-century heyday to uncritically justify capital investment whilst effacing the traumatic pasts embodied at the same time as impacting on present day residents’ experiences and understanding of the landscape they inhabit.