In Today’s Site Specific Lesson, we were concentrating on letting our creativity loose, as we were told to create a text, invent a unique map and lead our group on a misguided tour, all to I think explore our site’s pre perceived perceptions.  The first activity we had to do to explore this idea was pick one subject from a range of subjects read out and create a short text from that subject.  For example George and I chose the subject of Ownership, when we first heard the word Ownership, we both were looking straight at the castle.  That got us thinking who actually owns the castle now, is it the council? a local business? or the public? With support from the quote, ‘Walking in our own city we’d often employ a deliberate confusion about what we were trying to solve or understand – was it the latest show or the city itself?’ (Etchells, 1999, 76-80) We thought of the idea to base our text around the word/statement ‘Mine?’ with the tagline ‘You think you own it but do you?’ This is supported by the quote as Tim Etchells is trying to say that when walking through a city you don’t what to understand, as a city is a vibrant mix of different culture,e specially Lincoln, that’s why our question of ownership as so poignant because in a historical city like Lincoln who does own it now.

The second activity we engaged in was to explore different and unique signs in order to see if we could unlock hidden meanings behind ordinary working day signs.  During our travels, there were lots of signs we documented see https://www.flickr.com/photos/131336919@N08/sets/72157650775845086/.  For example behind signs such as ‘We are listening’ and ‘Vicars Court Private’, we thought that Lincoln Locals could hear us and we were constantly being watched and all vicars were very private human beings in Lincoln.  With this quote, ‘The neon signs, the old advertising slogans, the fragments of graffiti – all of these things made it into our shows.’ (Etchells, 1999, 76-80) we thought this grabbed our idea with these signs beautifully because any other time of the day they’re normal working signs but when we explore them, they can mean so much more.

The last activities we had to engage with was creating our own unique maps of our site and also create a misguided tour of a specific area of our site, to see what our site looked like with different interpretations.  For our Map, George and I decided to create a texture map by rubbing textures of different parts of our site, all the way from the Cathedral to the Water tower, in order to see how these buildings and objects feel different but yet have our site in common.  ‘To see the city from one’s bed, from one’s bath, from one’s rooftop – how perfect to live in a city.’ (Etchells, 1999, 76-80) This quote sums up what our map was trying to do, as we all see and feel the city if Lincoln in different surroundings but with our texture map, you can start to see that these buildings do have some things in common like the texture of the bricks and objects found around these historical buildings.

The last activity we did, was make a misguided tour in a specific place of our site, near a Roman well.  We could use our imaginations and interpret our tour with whatever story we liked and through anybody’s eyes.  We decided to be a pair of historical researchers, researching into a story of a Nineteenth century killer who hid in the well, by using the Nineteenth century memorials, we believed we had the right evidence to back our misguided tour up.  ‘Playing always to the different histories written in urban space – the official historical, the personal, the mythical and the imaginary.’ (Etchells, 1999, 76-80)  This quote perfectly sums up what we did in our misguided tour as we knew our tour was untruthful, but because we used certain facts, we heightened up the legitimacy of our grizzly, gruesome tour.  Overall I feel this session really helped me understand the interpretation of this site, which gave me a good start to understand how to create a imaginative performance within relation to the historic value of our site.

Works Cited

Etchells, T. (1999) Certain Fragments. London: Routledge.