In our fifth episode, we hear from the Heritage Education Centre Space at Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre. The HECS speak on precision, partial knowing and decentering histories.
For full transcript and web links, visit: listeningwith.substack.com
Mary-Anne McQuay 0:02
Hello, you're listening with the Bluecoat in Liverpool, a series of podcasts taking the themes of our exhibition programmes as a starting point for 15 minute insights from artists, scientists, writers, educators, storytellers and more. In this episode we hear from the Heritage Education Centre Space a Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre. The HECS speak on precision, partial knowing and decentering histories.
Kym Ward 0:29
I'm Kym, I'm one of the people who operate and run Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre over on the Wirral. We've been running for a couple of years now since 2018/2019. And is a space for researchers, artists, philosophers, dancers, musicians to come, stay and work on their own practices communally or individually.
Maeve Devine 0:56
I'm Maeve. I am a musician and sound art practitioner. I've been a friend and associate of the Observatory for about a year now. And I'm really interested in how we experience sound, and music in places and spaces and linking those experiences with oral histories. And this idea that there's a lineage of sound, when you hear a sound, you can trace it to its origin. And that becomes part of a wider kind of interlaced, I guess kind of tapestry of sounds and experience, which then for me, kind of bleeds out into like, music history and like popular culture, and then little bits of identity politics and whatnot. But specifically for me, I'm interested in how neurodiverse people process sound sensually, and how they experience sound in places. So I've been working a little bit with some of the artefacts here at the Observatory, and some of the spaces here as well. I'm really fascinated by reverb, but I haven't fully explored what that is yet. And I too have an interest in witchcraft and I guess specifically the - how would you say it - the transformation of energy from state to state, and, um, where sound fits in with that? If indeed it does. Spoiler: it does.
Jara Rocha 2:51
Hello, my name is Jara Rocha. This is my second time visiting the Bidston Observatory. I come from Barcelona. I'm an interdependent researcher there and around. And I'm here as part of the Vibes&Leaks group, which has a focus on the inner crossings between the phenomenon of the voice and its inscribed politics.
Kym Ward 3:27
So HECS is the Heritage Education Centre Space, and it sits inside Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre. The Artistic Research Centre is a place that artists, designers, dancers, philosophers, musicians can come and stay between two nights in a month. And HECS is dedicated to the history of the building. So the building's an old observatory. It was built in 1866. And from its foundings, to the mid 2000s, it was home to natural earth sciences research. So the Heritage Education Centre Space, which has a physical room in the building, empty at the moment, this is the focus for some of the researchers that come through here who want to engage with the history and heritages - multiple. Yeah, so HECS is a play of sound. We understand that it sounds a bit like a witch's spell somewhat, and we're having a kind of a joke reference or a playful reference to that which sits outside science or sits outside 'capital H History' or sits outside, well, received knowledges. And we're trying to do that in lots of different ways, which I guess we're going to go into. If we start to think about maybe we could separate the words of HECS so Heritage Education Centre Space and we can maybe talk a little bit through those.
Jara Rocha 4:54
H as in ‘heritage’, and I guess also patrimony, and inheritance, and unexpected modes of passing on memories or knowledges.
Kym Ward 5:08
Well, the building itself is quite a monument on the like skyline of the Wirral. And it's really cherished by lots and lots of people from their childhoods to adulthood. And then when people find out the specific histories, which were important histories in British imperialism, British war efforts, then they feel quite a close bond.
Kym Ward 5:39
We are trying to think through heritages in slightly different ways and expanded forms, not just the stories that might usually be told of the directors and those images - they still will be told - but also very many other stories which relate to the histories of different explorations of science. So this place was always used for applied research. So that's one of the things which now connects it to its current usage as a artistic research centre. We do a lot of... or the researchers that come through here, or the practitioners that come through here, do a lot of thinking through making. One of the things that we can inherit in different forms of knowledge is our practice of experimentation, which might not be the same as science has recognised previously.
Kym Ward 6:31
In every point in history, heritage is also what is kept alive by the people who are living, and the people who commit and want to push energy, or to hold space, or to transmit. And so I guess this is kind of what you're motioning to, no? It's the community that keeps it alive, which is giving it the life to be able to transmit into the future. We don't know how it's going to work, because the communities that were here were scientific communities, and now they're more artistic communities. So we're definitely experiencing the moving together of these two, well, I mean, traditionally they would be called disciplines. But maybe if we can think a little bit more expanded then we would just say, people who have a kind of interest in or a job or a vocation or however, or the labour that they would like to push. And then we try to figure out what are the precedents which was set by modern Western science, that allowed for a lot of research to take place, and a lot of new applications to occur. And then we and then we see how we can repeat these stories or not repeat these stories, or engage them in different ways.
Kym Ward 7:53
So we didn't call, I should probably say, we decided not to call the space and the activities, we've decided not to kind of put it under the umbrella of 'museum'. So we tried to find other ways to describe the kind of relation to history that we would have here. So 'heritage education' would be then a kind of co-learning again, of what heritage would be, rather than teaching anybody about what heritage is, that's not the point. The point is to try to communally come together and take it as a constellation of objects or an instrument, or maybe an activity that used to happen here or well, some artists work with the idea of time itself, you know, and then figure it out together, try to kind of make new new practices and knowledge.
Kym Ward 8:45
Maeve was working with the weather cabin upstairs. And she was working with an anemometer up there, which is from early 1900s, late 1800s, early 1900s. So that instrument is completely defunct now, it doesn't work in the way that it's supposed to. You probably see it if you've driven around near the observatory, then it's the highest point on top of the roof and it's like a big weather vane. And it would have once measured wind speed, direction and pressure. The wind would blow down some tubes and then that would be registered with an arm on a drum and it makes a notation. So, Maeve - you were turning these notations of the wind into different notes? ('Gust Compression Composition' sound piece plays)
Kym Ward 10:33
That's one example of ways in which different researchers engaged with the instruments here. We're calling it education or co-inquiry or co-research. And in this case, it would be the co-inquiries might be Maeve, and the wind now, and the wind from 1906, and the weather cabin, which is quite an exciting constellation to be working with. But there are many other different ways of working with the instruments. A lot of them you can see featured on the wiki or trying to be described on the on the media wiki.
Jara Rocha 11:12
I want to ask you about C, as in ‘centre’, despite maybe our intention to displace the object out of focus
Kym Ward 11:23
I know that a lot of museums right now are starting to examine their collections, they're starting to engage in different processes of decolonisation, and that it seems to be quite well known in the public realm. We've been working with this with these types of critique, and also playful and also energetic works for quite some years now, I would say. We know that as a building of this kind can't be thought of outside of the era in which it was built. And so in that time, the predominant mode of ascribing, or collecting or acquiring or accumulating was what was producing the value of the objects.
Kym Ward 12:09
We find ourselves being very careful about how we would like to go forward with the Heritage Education Centre space, not to repeat old modes of colonialism, basically imperialism. It's not necessary to, for example, have the object that was here in 1867, the exact one, you know. It's not so important to have the object that is attached to the name of the director, it's not so important to have the original object or even a facsimile or even a simile, but rather to try to keep at the centre of focus, a displacement of the object itself. So what we mean by this is that if you would enter the World Museum, then one person might have an understanding of a chronometer, let's just take a ship's chronometer (as the example). In one way another person might have a another way, the history of the chronometer might be repeated by a material understanding. So the history of the oil that the chronometer used in its internal mechanisms, or it might be described by somebody who'd once discovered it, who'd never seen anything like it. By its human and by its non-human components, let's say. The chronometer is not at the centre in that case, there is no centre, there's only the descriptions and the understandings and the knowledges which then form a circle around the object. And so that's why we say 'Centre Space' even though it's a little bit clunky, because we're trying to keep what is at the centre open for understanding, for partial understanding.So we don't aim for a complete understanding of every single way that an object or an instrument or a piece of history can be understood. We aim for partial understandings, which are maybe representive of those partial understandings themselves. And you can see that in the wiki.
Kym Ward 14:07
One of the things that I wanted to speak about actually was a mode of attentiveness to history, as in giving space. So some of the ways that we've been speaking about the building of the observatory is that the people who own it, and the people who run it are guardians of it, and that's temporary. We try not to make too much intervention into the building itself, but we just try to respectfully preserve it. And in terms of the Heritage Education Centre Space, we understand that that some of the objects in the museum or some of the histories, as we kind of mentioned a little while ago, they only are preserved for as long as people remember them, no? For as long as those knowledges are transmitted. So we take a mode of what we call palliative care of the objective of the building, we kind of gently and respectfully lower them into, or support them into an ending, which is both careful but also understands that it's coming to an end, no? Letting go. That's my understanding of 'space' in the Heritage Education Centre Space.
Jara Rocha 15:27
Thank you so much.
Marie-Anne McQuay 15:31
You've been listening with the Bluecoat, produced by George Maund, Marie-Anne McQuay and Sam Mercer with sounds by nil00. Thank you to Garfield Western Foundation for supporting this series, and our core funders Arts Council England, Liverpool City Council and Culture Liverpool. Our public programmes rely on grants or donations and you can support us at: thebluecoat.org.uk/donate
George Maund 15:52
The wind music piece you heard woven throughout is called 'Gust Compression Composition' and it's by Quieting. You can find a link to their music online in this episode's notes.
Links
Quieting’s music can be found at: https://soundcloud.com/user-798274310
Volumetric Regimes - Jara Rocha & Femke Snelting:
http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/volumetric-regimes/
https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=Volumetric_Regimes
HECS: https://wiki.bidstonobservatory.org/
Teaching To Transgress Toolbox: http://ttttoolbox.net/
