Dead Isle - Endangered heritage ecologies
ONLINE - Thursday 6th April 2023 at 7pm
This talk is about a new project that brings together archaeology, art and ecology. It will focus on why these connections are important, and why they are of value to local communities.
In 1871 Alfred Nobel started building a dynamite factory on the Ardeer Peninsula in North Ayrshire, Scotland, for the manufacture of black powder, safety fuse, and detonators. From the 1940s onwards, munitionettes worked there and they graffitied lyrics on the walls of their workspace, of old and new songs, whilst they were cutting cordite paste. The sand mounds that surround the huts now support nesting songbirds. Alex Boyd, Iain Hamlin and I are negotiating new ways in which to deal with a situation where the built environment is decaying whilst ecological habitats thrive, and yet there is the constant possibility of further development that would put all of this at risk. How do we value the human and the non-human in such a landscape? How are we creating a new kind of account of memory and place? Let me tell you a little bit about it all on the 6th of April...
Images courtesy of Alex Boyd.
