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Landguard Fort Re-inhabited: Textual and aural narrative, uncovering and creating stories between place and audience

Part 2 Dissertation 2014
Rebecca Lee
 University of Brighton | UK
Landguard Fort, Felixstowe, has a rich history beyond that which physically remains on the site. It has been witness to historically significant events but also contains subtle references to an accumulation of more personal stories. With empty rooms void of the original content, but a carefully preserved building fabric, the atmospheric spaces appear to have been suspended in time. The combination of a rich collection of compelling stories, a lack of formal interpretation and a pervading sense of absence has become the stimulus for this work.

There is an increasing tendency for museums and heritage properties to rely on the use of digital interpretation strategies. The use of ‘augmented reality’, as a way of combining the ‘real’ and the virtual, is becoming a popular tool for extending the boundaries of the museum providing access to information outside of the museum’s physical fabric. This study seeks to set another, ‘low tech’ strategy against this and examines how narrative and language can be used to develop a productive and considered relationship between narrative content, spatial context and audience, and become part of curatorial and design strategies for heritage sites. The power of ‘environmental storytelling’ is explored through engaging with narrative discourse and the spatial implications of language from the linguistic perspective and in the tangible spatial context of Landguard Fort.

Heritage sites, such as Landguard Fort, where the spaces are the exhibit, have a latent potential with an extensive array of partial yet vivid stories, which hang, interweave and overlap in the spaces, waiting to be released. Focusing on thresholds, both physical and immaterial, this research explores how a careful engagement with processes of transition, blending and oscillation between subjective and objective, imagined and real, then and now can animate a place, by stimulating the imagination of its temporary occupants through acts of ‘reading in space and time’. There is no single author, no single curator but a multitude of different voices and times encouraging chance happenings, unpredictable collisions, and the showing of incongruences and similarities between narrative content and spatial context.

Tutor(s)
Karin Jaschke
2014
Through the actions of the reader turning the pages the text moves, overlaps and becomes obscured. The lighting conditions of the environment in which the book is read alter the visible content.
The book has an extended entrance. The reader travels through the layers of Landguard Fort before reaching the main body of text.
The text has a physical structure beyond the construction of a sentence. It cannot be read in a linear way and the style of the text is reflective of the object, action or process to which it refers.
Chiswick Gardens, London. An audio description of a dialogue between the characters in the image plays out, but the view through the frame is void of any similarity to either the image or the descriptive audio.
Little Sparta, Edinburgh. The text ‘BRING BACK THE BIRCH’ invites the participant to question what is missing from the scene and imagine how the scene was at one time more complete – encouraging a kind of ‘over reading’ of the space.
Landguard Fort, Felixstowe. Entering the fort. Entering the text.
The existing interpretation strategy is informal. The text is printed in black ‘Times New Roman’ lettering on white A4 paper and placed on the nearest suitable surface within the room, be it on a fireplace, windowsill or shelf.
The spaces of the fort have a sense of absence and loss as they are void of their original content. However, on close inspection marks and traces can be found to give clues of the activities of previous occupants.
The incomplete traces are studied through processes of forced ‘over reading’ in order to try and establish what might have been written before the text began to fade.
The ephemeral nature of the content is reflected in the characteristics of the material choice as the clarity and visibility of the text is affected by the material of the fort behind and therefore is altered by the angle from which it is viewed. The scal
The word becomes ‘of the space’ interacting with the light, set within the context of the paint-peeling walls and an unlit weathering fireplace. This along with the sense of a quiet absence, emphasised by the echo of the visitor’s footsteps, evokes a pow
The site for this text is chosen carefully so that there is a productive relationship between spatial context and narrative content. On this day the light is flat so no shadows are cast but the letters are reflected in the wet surface of the concrete shel
The sentence is read as the reader moves through the physical space of the fort. The unfolding of the meaning is much slower and encourages the reader to imagine multiple versions of the completion of the sentence as they move through the space.
The text follows the physical structure of the space and the reader encounters the text as a whole, viewing the assemblage of words in one instant.
The changing lighting conditions may mean that the words are stronger on some days and hardly visible on others. This is dependent on conditions external to the control of both the curator and audience, as the stories become entangled with the condition
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