Context
- This project is about producing an archive of material, more specifically, a ‘phenomenological archive’, recording my lived experience of my hometown of hastings.
- Framing: ‘haunted-geographies’, Hastings as a town defined by absence and decline as much as presence. ‘Absence and decline’ is an initial direction. As I have become more conscious of my surroundings (the upshot of thinking about this project) I increasingly see the potentiality in this town, the forward motion, the hope, opportunities, the slow transformation that is happening.
- As I get deeper in I will actively look for germinations in the process and the output at each step of my journey. I will respond to those, not work to a predefined thematic plan
- I am not proving something, I am just ‘evidencing
Archive Records: What “Data” Could mean in a Phenomenological Archive
“Archive” as a word usually implies neutral storage, but for this project, it needs to be explicitly relational – it needs to contain evidence of an encounter, not records of facts. Contextual material should capture the texture of being-with rather than information-about.
Possibilities:
Bodily/ Sensory Traces
- Walking logs — not just routes (GPS, maps) but the phenomenology of the walk itself: pace, breath, fatigue, what my body noticed before the mind named it
- Audio recordings of place — not “soundscapes” as ambient backdrop, but recordings made with attention to my own listening position (where was I standing, what was I straining to hear, what did I stop hearing after ten minutes etc)
- Tactile records — rubbings, casts, photographs of surfaces I’ve touched (groynes, shingle, render, rust)
- Weather-body logs — how wind off the Channel, damp, light quality at different times of year registered in me physically
Material Remains of Encounter
- Found objects (with provenance notes — not “sea glass” as category but this piece, this day, this state of mind)
- Photographs that fail — blurred, mistimed, the ones that didn’t “work” as images but registered something about the moment of looking
- Painting/drawing made in situ vs. from memory afterward — the gap between them is itself data about how the town persists or fades in me
Documentary/ Relational Traces
- Conversations with residents, transcribed or recorded — Hastings as collaborator partly through the people who also inhabit it
- Archival photographs or postcards of Hastings juxtaposed with my own images of the same sites — the town’s image of itself vs. my encounter with it
- Local newspaper clippings, planning notices, anything that shows the town’s own self-narration alongside my felt experience of it
Negative/ Absence Data
- What I didn’t photograph, didn’t record, avoided — absences are data in a haunted-geographies frame
- Demolished or changed sites — my memory of what’s no longer there, layered against what is
Possible Themes
A few threads of suggestion:
- Presence/absence and decline — the Victorian resort town’s slow recession, and what persists in the built environment as a kind of residue or haunting
- Reciprocity and asymmetry — I am changed by walking Hastings repeatedly; does Hastings register me in any sense? This pushes into my non-human collaboration thinking — can the town be said to “respond”?
- Edge/threshold — Hastings as a literal edge (sea, cliff, periphery of England both geographically and economically) — liminality as both theme and method
- Repetition and accumulation — returning to the same sites over time, building a stratified rather than linear archive (this could even structure the archive itself — organised by site revisited, not chronology)
- Weather and seasonality — the town inflected by light, tide, tourist season vs. off-season emptiness
- My own biography intersecting the town’s — autoethnographic threads, where any part of my personal history is bound up with Hastings
Structural Thoughts
- Could organise the archive not by medium but by site or encounter, with each entry being multimodal
- A single data point could be a walk + recording + object + painting + field note, all date and located, building a layered ‘stratigraphy’ over the project’s duration
- This would formally embody the intra-active framing rather than just describing it