About HECS
The Center 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
The HECS documents spaces, objects and instruments related to the Bidston Observatory on the Wirral, Merseyside, UK. Most of the usual tales being told and retold about the 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, 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.
Invitations for contributing to this wiki ~ add your own
The wiki does not look to homogenise voices or smooth transitions. It aims to be humble, transparent and expansive. It is meant to be re-read, written, re-written through multiple voices and from different perspectives.
For the moment we propose to re-narrate The Bidston Observatory from two directions. On the one hand, through formulating a list of questions with possible answers that seem in need of collective thinking. On the other hand by experimenting with describing historical and imaginary (non)objects that are linked to the Bidston Observatory. This also includes a reflection on what objects are present in this wiki and will find their place in the HECS.
