6-7 June 2008

Angela Piccini on Bristol Temple Meads

slide Our first workshop took place at Bristol Temple Meads. Jo Carruthers and I decided to work with the station complex for a number of reasons: slide

• The British railway network figures as a key materialisation of nineteenth-century industrialisation. From E P Thompson’s early work on the production of time by the new railways through to more recent studies of the interconnectedness of slavery, industry and migration, railways and their stations have been marked out as key spaces of transition and capital.

• Situated within Redcliffe, a prime area for regeneration in Bristol, Temple Meads is home to Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s World Heritage Site passenger shed, housed within the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum. Currently a slide contemporary conference venue it is hidden from public users and has become a contemporary site of ‘culturally emptied’ space, while historically it was a site of transition and mass migration. The museum has been controversial since its inception. It is currently in the process of closing and Bristol is losing its important collections, which are going to Kensington. slide

• Timed to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Brunel, this workshop aimed to use the passenger shed to explore issues around landscape and memory through a focus on mobility, empire, industry and materiality.

• As I said earlier, the site presents interesting slippages: the building we assume is Brunel’s is not. His original station, though a remarkable feat of engineering given the land conditions in this part of Bristol and the need to orientate the rail network for easy access to the floating harbour, failed to link to the Devon and Cornwall line. This was simply an end point from London.

• Temple Meads related to the other 2 workshops through an interest in the ways in which spaces are produced through networked infrastructures – the material traces of peoples’ past movements. It seemed to us that all 3 sites usefully engaged with ideas about how humans and non-humans dynamically produce space but also, how places themselves constrain and produce human and non-human action. We follow rail lines, paths, directional signage.

Slide The previous May Jo and I organised a 1-day pilot project at St Andrew’s Churchyard in Clifton, also known as birdcage walk. We chose this site because of its proximity to the university here but also because it’s familiarity overdetermines it. It positively reeks of student life, affluent Clifton and the picturesque of the dead. It is also a site composed of a linear pathway, which bisects it – the edges of which are bordered with iron railings. Users therefore pass through it, rather than inhabit it. The foundations of the parish church, bombed in the second world war, presented us with yet another manifestation of emptiness for us to work with. Because Jo and I were collaborating on its organisation, we wanted to combine documentary and archival methods in order to frame the possibilities for the day. Background reading and material from the Bristol Records Office situated our activities very much in the arena of heritage and literature studies, with a heavy focus on text and trace.

However, other than introduce participants to the site and the archival material, we took a rather organic approach to how collaboration might settle out of the mix. As it was a relatively small site, we drifted in and out of group working. It was in conversation and through watching what each other was doing that tiny shifts in our individual practices occurred. By the time that we came to work up the day into presentations at a symposium, we all felt as though – despite producing individual outcomes – we had worked collectively towards a way of knowing the place that emerged through the proximity of our works rather than through a singular response.

At Temple Meads the organisational approach was similar. With my background in archaeology and documentary and Jo’s in literature and archives, we both find that working out from material fragments a useful way to begin. We produced a pack of historic photographs, fragments from literature about railways and the building history of Brunel’s station, including lots of detail about how much wood was used and from where it was sourced. This passage from Dombey and Sons was seen to be particularly useful and framed the weekend.

And we were also keen to work with the tensions between the two sites within the complex. We knew that these were difficult spaces with their management structures, security regulations, health and safety rules, the cacophony of the railway station and the tight-lipped inscrutability of the museum. Here’s platform 3 of the station, the passenger shed at the museum when it’s being used for a camra event and the old carriage turning that is now to the rear and below the museum, but which once….There was little beauty and little opportunity to loiter. Jo and I scheduled periods for both group and individual work and our main aim was simply to begin the work of getting people to work together. The way into the weekend placed a great deal of emphasis on trying to elicit from participants how they would initiate a group project from within their own disciplines, given that our starting points were texts and objects. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the work we all made condensed around some key themes:

Noise – sonic, visual, experiential

Surveillance – cameras, security guards, restricted access

Text – the pervasiveness of explanation and instruction

Forgotten space – the picturesque allure of the unmanaged traces of human activity. These forgotten spaces could also be oases away from the sound and activity of the site, like platform 6 or the farthest end of the platforms or this waiting room .

This first workshop enabled us to set out the range of questions that we needed to explore in the Network that touched on curatorial strategies, disciplinary respect and, moreover, the imprecision of language and the rich diversity in both the understandings and uses of both performativity and emptiness.