About HECS

The Centre is Open!

This wiki is written collectively. Feel free to add. This wiki is meant to re-read, write, re-write and create narratives about Bidston Observatory, multivoiced and from different perspectives.

Open means: open for construction. Open for contributions, participation.

Rather than starting from fixed positions and unmovable pasts, this wiki presents realities, histories and futures that open perspectives, that start from questions and interrogations.

Orientations of the Wiki

Entries for objects and non-objects are welcome. The wiki does not look to homogenise voices or smooth transitions. It aims to be humble, transparent and expansive. It's an invitation to improvise and tinker with objects and ideas.

Invitations ~ add your own

• How can Bidston Observatory be contextualised as a colonial apparatus? How can our understandings of the site and its histories not reproduce colonial relationships and patterns?

• Are the instruments at the site usuable, dead, or a mix of both? How can their active use and application be a part of artistic research in the present?

• How do the intruments at Bidston today relate to replicas, originals or other versions of the same technologies?

• How can damage to the site and related objects be rethought? What repair skills – conceptual and mechanical – can contributors bring?

• What ways of thinking or practices could be hospiced into disappearance rather than repaired?

• What does it mean to accumulate a collection, in a site like this? For a project like BOARC?

• What defines a museum? What counts as heritage?

• Can this wiki document the absences and traces at Bidston Observatory?

• How does the space of Bidston reflect its intended uses? How can Bidston and its 'contents' be repurposed?

• How can the wiki include views from different people impacted by colonialism and its legacies? By disgruntled historians of science, astronomy, and oceanography? By the local community?

• Can the entries here archive aspects of how knowledge has been made and structured, now and in the past?

• How can the wiki address archival sources in ways that read them both against and along the grain of their original purposes?

Care of the Wiki

• The wiki needs to be cared for collectively. Damage will happen over time, please do offer repairs if you notice wear or signs of use in the writing.