Imagined Heritage

Our collective memory is made solid through a sentimentality for ruins, those un-curated artefacts that persist as analogous remnants from a previous time. Often, the most compelling depictions of built heritage exist within the forgotten, lost or absent. When fully or partially ruinous, heritage provides a context for factual and imaginary histories applied to a visceral space as a context-based experience as an entanglement of matter and meaning. The space vacated by absent material culture is replaced by a heavier aura, awaiting transmutation into an alternative version of itself. In this sense, the adaptive reuse of heritage spaces, however speculative, are the material embodiments of nonmaterial intentionality (Viveiros de Castro) and as a maker of place. Belonging to object-oriented ontologies, it is a reshaping of its own assumed aura (Benjamin) as an intentionally distorted reproduction of its essence (Plato).

Adaptive reuse of heritage is, in this sense, an exploration of imagined belonging, locatable within a field of immanence (Deleuze) and ‘being in the world’. It crafts a phenomenological encounter that is heavier than faithful reproduction, with a weight that belongs to the speculative interpretations of absent, or untold realities. As a duality, it simultaneously depicts real and nostalgic, alternative, and imagined histories, enriching the spatial and sensory character of place. The multi-dimensional palimpsest of space, place and time embedded within the locations of knowingly absent heritage liberates them from the dogma of tabula rasa, defining all such place as tabula plena, where a density of previous marks and layered spaces remain (Roberts). Adaptations of heritage perform biographical translations of these read, assumed, and collaged histories, scripting autobiographical manifestations of now, itself and the phenomena of place, whilst performing a fictional narration of an immediate, constructed, future heritage.

This paper seeks to establish new perspectives on how imagined heritage can shape our understanding of place, memory, and identity, ultimately proposing that adaptive reuse serves as a bridge between the material and nonmaterial, the historical and the speculative.