Royal Geographic Society Annual Conference 2018

Description of Activity

Wymering Manor: ordinary matters and everyday practices in at risk historic sites
Belinda Mitchell (University of Portsmouth, UK)
Karen Fielder (University of Portsmouth, UK)
Focussing on historic buildings which are at risk, we are interested in the disciplinary territory that lies in the overlap between interior design and conservation practice by conceptualising historic interiors as unfinished sites of experience loaded with affective capacity. The work aims to examine the representation of such spaces from the inside out through new materialist theories and creative methodologies in order to articulate the sensory in conservation practice and to rethink historic interiors accordingly. An uninhabited 16th-century timber-framed manor house in Portsmouth provides a case study for this experimentation. We propose that the house is experienced all the more poignantly as it hangs in a transitional state prior to any unified programme of restoration and reuse which would determine a fixed and static end point.
The concern in this essay is with the house, its material/immaterial matters and the matter of the local community who are reimagining its futures in their ongoing efforts to save it. We are interested in the everyday community responses to the impulses that derive from the material mattering of vulnerable historic sites and the values and attachments that are formed through these material flows. The commonplace interactions and gestures of the community are discussed through referencing Kathleen Stewart, where “the ordinary is a shifting assemblage of practices and practical knowledge, a scene of both liveness and exhaustion, a dream of escape or of the simple life”.

Period	30 Aug 2018
Event type	Conference
Location	Cardiff, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International