About HECS

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

(below needs rewriting)

• Are the instruments usuable, dead, or a mix of both. Being able to move

if Bidston is an artistic research center, then active use and application could be part of that ?

• What does it mean to purchase instruments from elsewhere (so not from the Observatory itself?) what is their alikeness? are they replicas?

• If the objects are not dead, what repair skills can people bring (buying broken instruments, it is something to do)

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

• Whats the balance between objects and mutlimedia. Contemporary conservation strategies, what is priviliged ? multimaterial ? Relation between instrument-objects and other-material objects such as audio, documents.

How is it conserved and what is its place in the space ?

• What is our stance on decolonial practices of collecting and conserving? How far are we in .. remuneration, repatriating .. in the stories that can be told/ collected about / from the building, we might want to speak to many other people, how to not be yet another colonial project. Not having totalistic relations.

-bring other voices in

• Heritage Education (de)Centre vs museum: if a museum, it would change the status of the space and planning permission rules.

—what defines a museum?—

• some things you dont have. what you do have is the building. many things absent from the building - what are the traces of the absences?

consider decribing the traces rather than fill it with object. What is the space/place of the building? How is it specific to the de-centre?

• a place of connection and deconnection here. what are the convergences?

what is the orientation of the wiki? Object? non-object? --> improvisation space, artistic research space how knowledge get structured?

• capture the traces and introduce them as entries in the wiki.

part of the wiki enable tinkering (way of describing the objects, as an invitation) trying not to use a universalizing voice / long quotes > freeing from the wiki protocols

We are looking for disgruntled historians of science/silence

• damage will happen (to this wiki), but people that come also like to repair, ,please do if you notice wear and usure in the writing. To make it possible to touch text, will mean the relationship will be different. It needs to be cared for collectively.