Autotopography: Bridging Lived and Living Experiences to Heritage Sites

Presentation abstract

Abstract

This workshop offers participants a way of engaging with cultural heritage that centres their lived and living experiences through an autotopographic approach. The aim of the workshop is to build bridges to the past, by centring personal narratives within the site(s) and practices of cultural heritage and using these personal experiences to offer unique insight into the performance, preservation, and promotion of cultural heritage. By offering a framework for considering how artisans, performer, guides, custodians and conservators can consider and discuss their own experiences of cultural heritage (who wouldn’t want to hear how a artisan became a master craftsperson, which pieces in a collection are a custodian’s least favourite, or how a local guide had their high-school prom in a 13th century castle) we build a connection to the person, their community, and the heritage which they are sharing. Through the use of the autotopographic (the dual way that our experiences of place create a sense of who we are, and how our sense of self creates our sense of place), we are able to uncover the ways that cultural heritage shaped, and continue to shape, the individual and how individuals shape the cultural heritages of today.

Delivered as a workshop where participants will be asked to consider their own relationships with cultural heritages through their own personal engagement with the field. During the workshop, participants will engage with the autotopographic framework which I have created as part of my PhD study. This framework encourages those people who work in the cultural heritage sector to consider their personal relationship to the place where they work and how they might make it ‘their own’.