Exeter-led research featured in Manchester Museum exhibition

University of Exeter researchers have contributed to a new Manchester Museum exhibition, which opened to the public in December. The exhibition is based on the work of the AHRC-funded Heritage Futures programme, which compares and contrasts heritage practices across a variety of domains. Caitlin DeSilvey, Associate Professor of Cultural Geography in the Environment and Sustainability Institute, leads research on one of the programme’s themes, Transformation, which has been looking at heritage and memory practices in landscapes that are undergoing change and transformation.

The exhibition features work carried out in the UK and Portugal by the Transformation research team (which includes Associate Research fellow Nadia Bartolini, PhD student Robyn Raxworthy, and Senior Creative Fellow Antony Lyons). At Orford Ness, a post-military site now owned by the National Trust, the Transformation team partnered with CITiZAN to explore the recording of archaeological features on the rapidly eroding coastline (Figure 1). In the Côa Valley in Portugal, the team investigated the re-introduction of ‘wild’ horses in abandoned agricultural lands, where Palaeolithic rock carvings provide a record of past animal inhabitants (Figure 2). The exhibition also includes a short film created by Heritage Futures researchers Nadia Bartolini and Jennie Morgan in Cornwall, which explores the relationship between the transformation of a landscape associated with china clay extraction and the birth of an archive (Figure 3).

The exhibition will run until Autumn 2021. For more information, please visit the Heritage Futures website.