About HECS

The Heritage Education Centre Space is Open / HECS is ajar!

This wiki is a space for testing out ideas for the Heritage Education Centre Space (HECS) that is unfolding. HECS is not quite yet open, so we use: ajar. Open means: open for construction. Open for contributions, participation. Ajar means: there will be some effort and energy involved to open up the space, we welcome and are grateful for the involvement, and the parameters of this are not yet fixed. HECS is one part of Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre.

Orientations of the HECS

Bidston Observatory is situated on the Wirral peninsula, in The UK. It is currently occupied by Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre (BOARC).

As part of BOARC’s wider project, the Heritage Education Centre (HECS) is dedicated to critically exploring the history of the building, the surrounding area, and the global networks of transit, exploration and extraction made possible by science in the British Empire.

Bidston's imbrication in the history of maritime trade and the British Empire calls for dedicated research into the ethical, contextual and expanded forms of visual culture, and museum and curatorial practice, which would support these histories.

HECS looks to engage in the complexity of visual cultures necessary to address the critical enquiry into nineteenth century British history. Part of HECS’ remit is to ask questions such as: How can a local museum reflect contemporary post-colonial discourse at the intersection of art and science? And: How might it be possible to situate this dialogue within scholarly and museological debate, at the same time as responding to this location and demand from communities which surround it?

The HECS documents spaces, objects and instruments related to Bidston Observatory - however these relations can be thought along networked, distributed or expanded forms. Most of the usual tales being told and retold about the National monuments, including this observatory, celebrate a succession of White British male scientists and their great inventions. HECS tries to make space for accounts that are extra to nation state, hetero-normative ideas of progress and the advancement of Science. The practice of observation, operating scientific instruments and investment in observatories is entangled with different scales of capitalist endeavour, colonialist and imperialist modes of worlding. The Bidston Observatory is connected to such modes through its contributions to the maritime industry, natural earth sciences and oceonography. HECS interrogates different instrumentations and approaches in these historically defined disciplines at various scales. It is a place to articulate these connections, and the responsibilities they bring. HECS gathers facts about the building itself, the artefacts and instruments that it once housed and still houses, but tries to connect them to larger histories and futures. No histories are told without bias, and so are the stories in this wiki.

additional notes:

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British museums are typically still rooted in nineteenth century thought, operating as public spaces for educational emancipation, and supporting canonical versions of histories which have, at root, accumulative principles and classist or colonial mind-sets. Currently, such museology is under heavy scrutiny and collecting as a practice of accumulation is being questioned deeply; so too is the function of museums as gatekeepers of value. The visual cultures which have supported the colonial and modern projects are starting to be reimagined, and while British national museums face the challenge of examining their collections and display, local museums might respond in a more agile manner. One of the challenges however, is to maintain an expansive focus on what might otherwise become a single- topic focus of a local museum. How might a post-colonial museum - dedicated to that which might otherwise be visualised as an arc of scientific progress - tell multiple and divergent accounts of the histories which intersect at the site, as well as its important contributions to British maritime trade and natural earth sciences? How might an overarching authorial museum 'voice' preclude a diversity of accounts, told by different actors?
Besides establishing a pertinent mode of address for a local museum such as HECS, we find an attendant question in the all too well-established tradition of display specific for science and technology museums. As a contemporary museum which engage audiences in a way that negotiates the accepted and to-be- expected scenography, the curatorial research at HECS will need to find ways to be relevant and open to divergent audiences, while provoking a dignified reflection on histories of Western modernity. Particularly at the site of Bidston Observatory, which is neither solely museum nor education centre, but host to a vibrant community of invested research practitioners embedded in a careful practice of public liaising, there is potential for a sensitive, experimental curatorial approach, which combines a critical reflection on the culture of observation with a thorough rethinking of the implications of local museum display. From older audiences interested in British history, to young researchers interested in post- colonial discourse; from artists and scientists at the juncture of both disciplines, to the local general public's interest in the architecture of the building-as-monument. Framing the expanded cultural histories of Bidston Observatory therefore needs dedicated consideration,

Questions

These are some of the questions that came up while we are trying to imagine to build the HECS in discussion with many others. Please feel welcome to add questions, or to rephrase the ones below.

• How to contextualise The Bidston Observatory? As a colonial apparatus, as ...
• 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 instruments 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?
• How is instrumentation linked to slavery?
• How to take the wider implications of observation into account?