Creative and Heritage Practice in Landscape Decision Making

Fourth symposium – Creative and Heritage Practice in Landscape Decision Making. 27/7/22

This symposium explores how contemporary heritage practice might create a forum for landscape decision making. It will draw on the growth in participatory methodologies in heritage to explore how we might create spaces for democratising discussion around future landscape decisions. This approach engaged with academic research regarding emotion and heritage practice by exploring how narrative and biography inform the way in which we ‘feel’ about place and how this affects what we ‘care’ about and how we make decisions with regards to heritage landscapes. Hence this workshop will integrate current theory and methods around co-curation by bringing activist stakeholders into the conversation. Finally it will bring in creative practice to explore how heritage organisations might work with creativity to engage audiences with deeper issues around landscape and bring different voices into the debate. Based at the Museum of English Rural Life, the symposium draws on MERL’s Arts Council England designated collection of archival, library, object and art materials related to the changing English landscape. The collection includes both the archives of pressure groups such as the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England and policy archives from government bodies such as the MAFF. Collections will be used as prompts for discussion around past approaches to making, enacting, and resisting landscape decisions, with a focus on how narrative and biography were used both by policy makers and activists in this process. A creative installation will also be used as a prompt for discussion and to catalyse future academic-creative-stakeholder co-curated creative installations at the Museum of English Rural Life and beyond.