Walking the Names: sensing presences and absences in a contested memory landscape

Abstract

ABSTRACT Bath (UK) is a designated UNESCO World Heritage site. A National Lottery funded Landscape Partnership, Bathscape, seeks to articulate a vision for the city as a Landscape City. Walking the Names (2019–21) was a cycle of slow participatory walks reading the names of those who had died of poverty in the Bath Union Workhouse. The site-specific work took place in the burial ground of the nineteenth-century institution where the dead were buried in unmarked graves. The paper reviews the project in the context of the emergence of uneasy memories and silenced voices in the contested spaces of Bath’s memory landscape. A walking arts process is presented as slow activism, offering a participatory, corporeal, sensory engagement with landscape, power and memory. Drawing on the vision of the Landscape City, reflecting on the city as ‘wounded’, the essay explores a co-creative process of embodied critical re-memorialisation generating contemporary resonances.