Breaking silences and revealing the disappeared: Walking-with legacies of slave-ownership, Bath (UK)

Abstract

An emergent walking arts approach is presented as an opening towards social repair. Drawing on an intra-disciplinary project, ‘sense-ing’ legacies of slave-ownership in the UNESCO World Heritage City of Bath (UK), an iteration of walking-with is discussed in the context of ‘pedagogies of discomfort’. Walkers on the Sweet Waters project, hosted by the author, participated in a research-creation process agitating thought and extending resonances through mark making and social media trails. The article explores strategies of curated juxtaposition and dissonance as provocations to involuntary thought and empathic response. A participatory, performative walking is outlined accessing embodied ways of knowing and the agencies of walkers and heritage. Walkers become story carriers and ‘affect aliens’, unsettling heritage accounts, breaking silences and revealing the disappeared. Reflecting on a creative-critical intervention on ‘authorized’ heritage the article presents a somatic approach to learning, heritage and social justice through walking arts.