Breaking silences and revealing the disappeared: Walking-with legacies of slave-ownership, Bath (UK)

Abstract

An emergent walking arts approach is presented as an opening towards social repair. Drawing on an intra-disciplinary project, ‘sense-ing’ legacies of slave-ownership in the UNESCO World Heritage City of Bath (UK), an iteration of walking-with is discussed in the context of ‘pedagogies of discomfort’. Walkers on the Sweet Waters project, hosted by the author, participated in a research-creation process agitating thought and extending resonances through mark making and social media trails. The article explores strategies of curated juxtaposition and dissonance as provocations to involuntary thought and empathic response. A participatory, performative walking is outlined accessing embodied ways of knowing and the agencies of walkers and heritage. Walkers become story carriers and ‘affect aliens’, unsettling heritage accounts, breaking silences and revealing the disappeared. Reflecting on a creative-critical intervention on ‘authorized’ heritage the article presents a somatic approach to learning, heritage and social justice through walking arts.

Reflections

“…27 There are also still traces of the industry that specialized in manufacturing brass goods for trade with Africa. 28 Less obvious is the high number of middle-class men and women in Bath who had invested in slavery, as evidenced by the records of claims and beneficiaries for slave compensation between 1814 and 1834. 29 Bath Spa University is built on land bought and "improved" by Joseph Langton in the eighteenth century (designed by Capability Brown, then Humphry Repton), and although there is no evidence that the family ever owned slaves, their estate was built by the inheritance generated by his family's trading interests in Bristol.…”