WATERSCAPE: Inform, Educate and Entertain
Waterscape is the result of jottings, notes, recreations and re-imaginings after reading a number of texts, as well as navigating and walking canals and rivers, and cycling towpaths.
There is no fetishisation of documentary evidence and primary sources: in fact, a guiding principle of WATERSCAPE is to go beyond any available historical evidence, so as to recreate the lives of the anonymous, unrecorded lower orders. Waterscape is rather more about boatpeople and navvies, slaves, convicts and itinerants, rather than technology, weights, measures, the statistical and the numbered. We are, in the words of E.P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class, rescuing the ignored ‘from the enormous condescension of posterity’.
I have concentrated on local canals and, in the spirit of oral culture and balladry, I have changed the words of a few old songs to fit with the rivers and inland navigations of Gloucestershire.
Waterscape is a work of Fusion: the blending of Fact and Fiction: the Genre of Faction. The genres of psychogeography and mythogeography have also led the watery way: Waterscape is an exercise in Navigeography.
“Non-fiction uses facts to help us see the lies. Fiction uses metaphor to help us see the truth.”
Thoughts derived from a reading of
Creating Memorials Building Identities The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic
(Alan Price Liverpool University Press 2012)
Doors of No Return,
Historic, documented, liminal places,
Not gone with the wind, but both visible and invisible,
Spaces and places in the black Atlantic archipelago
With messages and mementoes from the slaving past,
Open doors to the truth –
But we too have landscapes – and WATERSCAPES –
Which require re-reading,
Reinterpretations that acknowledge a history
That might be interwoven with the triangular trade,
But whose messages are obscured or buried –
The home of Stroud Scarlet, for example;
Or the lives of the forgotten and ignored
On our canals and rivers and oceans.
So how do we create a counter-narrative?
That is,
“A performative counter-narrative, what we might call a ‘guerrilla memory’”,
Or “Lieux de memoire, sites of history, torn away from the moment of history”
(Pierre Nora),
Memorialisation that moves beyond ‘obsessional empiricism’ and
‘The fetishisation of surviving historical documents and sources’,
To a counter-heritage, a counter-memorialisation…
Buildings and landscapes and Waterscapes
With hidden connections,
For further reinterpretations,
And re-imaginings,
As we move art and monument
From object to process,
And from ‘noun to verb’,
As we create new museums of the past, present and future.