Silent Witness 'The Monument'
Audio Experience
at
The Monument to The Great Fire of London
Curatorial Statement
To whom it may concern …
Buildings like books hold the traces of things that have passed, the voices of those who have gone before us and the echo of times that may or may not be too dissimilar to yours. The worn step and the thumbed page are shared; a common feature between then and now and one that inextricably links us. These things I have collected between the pages of many scrap books, every meeting minute and every newspaper cutting dutifully noted and recorded … for preservation and for memory of the people and the times of this magnificent building that stands before you. A secretary’s dream of uniformity and order of information, satisfying our human need to document. No doubt my records have been hidden for some time, growing mould, and collecting dust. But now here you are. There are so many stories to tell that’s it is difficult to know where to begin – but I have decided to start with this one …XXXXXX (name)
Secretary [WNEIS script, copyright: yellow brick][1]
Monuments and Memorials: Definitions
Monument: Middle English denoting a burial (place): via French from Latin monumentum from monere ‘to remind, advise, warn, teach!
Memorial: A statue or structure established to remind people of a person or event.
Historical Empathy and Emotional Engagement
‘Museums, memorial centres, and other heritage institutions have traditionally relied on the use of physical artefacts to provide visitors with an experience of authenticity. Increasingly, they draw on other strategies to trigger people’s imaginations, which either support or replace existing modes of display (Dicks 2003; Mason 2004). Often these strategies are – consciously or unconsciously – solicited to evoke an emotional response that serves to elicit empathy for and/or moral engagement with historical events and actors portrayed through an exhibition’.
Geerte M. Savenije & Pieter de Bruijn
In the past, history education relied on imagination as literary invention and fantasy as agent provocateur for historical empathy but that has changed in the last decade with the focus shifting to the reconstruction of people’s perspectives through the acquisition of knowledge and understanding of the broader historical contexts in which figures have acted and an analysis of the possible motives, beliefs and emotions that guided their actions (Endacott and Brooks 2013).
This current perspective is compatible with psychological research that propose that cognitive and affective aspects of empathy are interdependent, defining it as a process of understanding and emotionally responding to the thoughts and feelings of others (Hoffman 1984).
It is said that history is written by the victorious but what about personal history? If we think of traditional monuments in the context of the victorious then that concept denotes individual achievements for the most part but there are monuments that sit outside that narrow scope and these monuments were not erected to commemorate any specific individual but to mark events and these monuments can be viewed with the lens of the many and not the elite few. The Monument to the Great Fire of London is one of those monuments that were erected to commemorate a tragic event which indiscriminately affected the entire population of London.
Care and Commemoration in Public Space
Word Origin late Middle English: from Latin commemoratio(n-), from the verb commemorare 'bring to remembrance', from com- 'altogether' + memorare 'relate' an action, or a ceremony, etc. that makes people remember and show respect for an important person or event in the past.
Commemoration is always amended and above all appropriated by those who experience it into the present. Monuments such The Monument to the Great Fire of London or the ‘Monument’ as it is affectionately known is indeed a unique piece of public commemoration that reflects care for the community and principally stands as a reminder of a great event that had profound impact on the lives of all Londoners in the 17th century. It marks a point of change and transformation.
Although the Monument itself is imposing, fixed in position and marks a tragic event as told by the stories surrounding it for the past 344 years, its performative nature is far from didactic.
History has shown that it has invited many temporal experiences that went on to shape our contemporary collective memory such as the suffragette protest for the women’s vote and many other events that are still re-shaping current policies, anthropology, and challenge society.
The Monument has taken additional functions of care and commemoration, it has become an archive to uncelebrated normality and a stand-in for the passage of time by implicating the viewer in participation through reflection of all the events that have shaped historic and contemporary London. It is a monument that is open ended. It is not there to intimidate; it is comforting in its resolute affection for London and its visitors.
Storytelling in Public Places- The Monument as Narrator
Since any place we can walk to or journey towards has the potential to become the screen or vision for a story, cities like London have become implicit in the shaping of narratives. Nowadays, it is indeed very difficult to find many books written about the great fire of London that do not include the Monument and outline its significance.
The city is thought of by Imanuel Schipper in Performing City as a productive process undergoing constant transformation and development and with that notion, so does the Monument. It is an integral part of the city’s performance. This performance is sensory, it is a time-based ephemeral experience, it is archived through documentation and in memory. It is a soundscape as well as a visualscape.
Audio Experience
Audio experiences can take many directions and draw inspirations from facts and imagination, they can inform and provide an escapism but as a creative form of expression they have found new traction and audiences in the 21st century. From storytelling to abstract soundscapes, audio experiences can enhance one’s experience in the sensory dimension. It can perform a task limited in some traditional visual tours and it may be accessible to wider audiences.
In the creation of my audio experience, I took the concept of a silent witness and applied it to the Monument and sought to create a fusion of sounds that reflect its connection to the city and its performative nature. The audio experience itself is a layered multi sourced soundscape of mixed places (inside and outside the Monument) and mixed time (Past and present). I think of it in the context of the Monument being a stage for new experiences and a portal to worlds beyond.
Looking at the Monument itself and listening to the narrative and accompanying ambient sounds also serves to connect the audience to the protagonists in the stories.
The Monument being the vision, the stage and the narrator also plays an added social role of raising questions about the relationship between public and private space in a city. It asks us to question our understanding of what a city is beyond its façade? It encourages us to reflect and recall the relationship between the city and its inhabitant’s past, present and consider the unpredictability of the future.
If the city is a public sphere formed by human agency, and the Monument is a stand-in for the city in it is publicness, then the performative nature of the Monument is not only reactive in nature to fixed urban realities, but also a tool for producing these realities by providing new knowledge and awareness of how we are affected by public space and how we affect it. This thinking should provide us with possibilities in choosing what realities we want to co-produce in our cities and monuments. An audio experience can be an effective and affordable method of writing endless stories.
[1] With New Eyes I See (WNEIS) was an itinerant digital heritage encounter funded by the REACT Knowledge Exchange Hub for the Creative Economy. http://www.react-hub.org.uk/.
Bibliography
1. Lovell, Vivien (Wed, 17 March 2021) Lecture “The Art of Urban Memory”, The Centre for Urban and Built Ecologies (CUBE), London Metropolitan University
2. Geerte M. Savenije & Pieter de Bruijn (2017) Historical empathy in a museum: uniting contextualisation and emotional engagement, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 23:9, 832-845, DOI: 10.1080/13527258.2017.1339108
3. Imanuel Schipper Source: TDR (1988-) , Fall 2014, Vol. 58, No. 3, Performing the City: Special Issue (Fall 2014), pp. 18-26
4. https://www.themonument.info/
5. Audio Recording made using https://www.audacityteam.org/
6. All artwork by Mae Shummo (2021)
7. https://freesound.org/
