ABSTRACT
I suggest that we have perhaps six options for creative engagement, each involving different relationships between practitioners (we/us) and visitors/ audience (they/them).
[1] They go and we do not. We leave it as it is: facilitating access, saying nothing, allowing the remains to “speak” for themselves, letting visitors address them in their own ways. For these tumbled walls are equivocal, serving as a backdrop or scenography for any narrative or fantasy that might be projected onto them, any knowledges and aspirations that might be brought to them, any interpretation that might be read “onto” and “into” them; a visitor’s experience of the same place may invoke reactions and associations entirely different from that of the inhabitants. It is possible to be in a place without realising its signifi cance for the groups of people who have historically inhabited it. For some, the response will be aesthetic and personal: the
romance of the ruin. For others the very ruination is evocative of the cultural trauma that it seems to represent, with the deciduous growth representing a kind of dogged resistance. A pile of old stones to walk your dog over then, or the defeated hopes of a nation? The visitor decides. Whichever, the senses are engulfed by the smells of decay, the textures of moss and dead leaves, the image of collapsed walls, fallen lintels, the gloom of forest shade. Here, the very processes of the “archaeological” are apparent: mouldering, rotting, disintegrating, decomposing, putrefying, falling to pieces . . . Apparent, too, that sense of the passage of time, of entropy-and of our own mortality perhaps-that the manicured sites of “heritage culture” often seem keen to disguise. Here, one realises, “it was then, it is now and all points in between”. And the visitor is aware that each surviving doorway was once entered, each window was once looked through. On this bleak hillside, where it will inevitably rain during a visit, people have struggled, survived and lived a life.
