Archives in Place

Researchers Nadia Bartolini and Jennie Morgan, along with Transformation PhD student Robyn Raxworthy, visited Wheal Martyn Museum and the China Clay History Society in Cornwall over two days in April 2017. The result of this collaboration was a short film that visualised the coming together of the Transformation and Profusion themes of the Heritage Futures programme.

The aim of the visit was to explore the relationship between the transformation of an industry and landscape associated with china clay extraction, and the birth of an archive. Doing so provided rich scope to examine shared thematic interests into heritage and future-making processes, the collecting of living memory, and the entanglements of place, materiality, and stories.

By using film as an approach, Nadia and Jennie also experimented in creating shared visual field-methods from different disciplinary backgrounds; this will be reflected in a journal article in development that explores film as method.

Like many other dispatches on our website, it provides a window into the ongoing fieldwork of our researchers, as well as the heritage-making practices of our partner organisations.