<< Past: Researching and representing the senses historically >>
The importance of historical thinking and methodology for understanding the role of the senses came increasingly to the fore over the course of the Sensory Cities Network. This is the case not only because many of the sensory features of a city are historically determined, or because the sensorial experience of history matters to inhabitants and visitors, but because history can offer crucial insights for understanding the culturally constructed and time-bound nature of sensory perception. Understanding the present sensorium is really impossible without a deeper understanding of its past. It is therefore necessary to integrate a historical understanding of place not only for the sake of understanding the past but for giving a long-term perspective to current debates and future developments. There is no better place to convey that sense of history than in the city museum.
i. Interdisciplinary Investigations:
More research and communication is needed to better understand how the senses have shaped the physical form and lived experience in different cities. Researching and representing the senses of the past poses different methodological challenges than researching the present. Most of the data gathering techniques developed to map the senses focus on the present rather than the past and cannot be directly applied to historical research: for all but the most recent past, it is impossible to interview, observe or ‘walk-along’ the people of past ages. Instead historians and curators have to rely on the sources that survived. The methods developed across the social sciences are nevertheless useful for researching the past. They first of all can help to develop a systematic and reflexive approach to the variety of sensory experiences that exist in a given place. We can then ask questions about how and why the sensory experience of places and people changed over time. In turn, the historians can draw attention to past sensory traces (or their absences) that are often overlooked if the focus is only on the present.
> Methods:
A range of methodologies can be used to map a site. For understanding the relationship between past and present, we found that it was particularly fruitful to start with interdisciplinary observations in situ involving researchers from historical and present-centred disciplines to gain a deeper understanding of the layered nature of sensescapes and timescapes.
Example: Cologne workshop - City of vision
Sensory Walking, Archival Research, Photography: As part of our Cologne Workshop, one group explored on the Eigelstein street how different disciplinary training, professional work (as historian, art historian, artist, photographer and curator) and prior knowledge of a street through research and/or personal memories effect what we sensed in the moment and and how we would approach the street in our work. We focused on visual methods. Underpinned by the discussion during the previous day of the Cologne City Museum’s exhibition on the Eigelstein quarter and the photographic work of one of the participants, we used a walk along methodology talking about what we saw, sensed and how we had, or would, use it in our work as historian, curator and photographer.
Eusebius Wirdeier recorded sensory changes through a photographic time series.
Kölnisches Stadtmuseum Eigelstein Exhibition
> Links to talks/literature:
Monica Degen & Astrid Swenson (Brunel University London)
The Sensory Cities Network: aims, findings, questions
Stefan Lewejohann (Kölnisches Stadtmuseum)
Eigelstein: 'History and Curation'
Eusebius Wirdeier (photographer)
Fotografische Arbeit am Eigelstein’/Fotographic work on Eigestein
ii. Using Objects & Sources:
A plethora of textual, visual and material sources can be used to research and represent the senses of the past. For the period that is still in living memory oral history and photo elicitation can for example be used. But the range of sources which can give insight into the history of the senses of more distant pasts is almost limitless, ranging from archaeological objects to architectural treatises (informing about the ideas behind the creation of sensory environments) to police archives (giving insight into the regulation and suppression of particular senses) via diaries, newspapers, novels, photography, sheet music, war postcards, snuffboxes, shoes, furniture or (fake) flint stones.
> Methods:
Most objects can give insight into the sensory conventions of their time of making. Their afterlives can help to illustrate changes over time. Here is an example of research that combines textual and visual archival research with sound recording.
Today the sound of the Cologne Cathedral bells is mostly appreciated for its timbre, but different sources on the bells can show the strong and changing political associations of sounds. The bells were cast from French cannons captured during the 1870 Franco-Prussian war; their ringing was meant to broadcast a message of military triumph and national unity rather than a purely religious one. Melted down in WWI to make cannons again, a new bell was cast in the interwar years. Posters advertised their sound as a ringing message of resistance to French occupation of the Rhineland. After the second world war the sound of the bells became identified with the city’s survival and reconstruction.
The Cologne Cathedral Bells
> Links to talks/literature:
Dr Astrid Swenson (Historian, Brunel University)
In the Shadow of the Cathedral: writing sensory histories
Sandra Kurfürst (University of Cologne)
Semiotics of urban space: producing and negotiating meaning in the city
Joan Subirats (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona)
Calle Hospital: a political analysis
Mateu Hernandez (CEO of Barcelona Global – Branding)
Barcelona’s reputation and the senses
Reading suggestions:
Constance Classen, ed. (2014), A Cultural History of the Senses, Bloomsbury 6 Volumes,
Robin Skeates (2010). An Archaeology of the Senses: Prehistoric Malta. Oxford University Press.
iii. Mediating Sensory Experiences:
It is in many ways impossible to ‘relive’ the senses of the past. Fleeting sensations are lost to the passing of time. Even if one could recreate exactly all sights, sounds, smells etc. they could not be experienced in the same way as in the past because each time has its own forms of sensory habituation and its own ideas about the meaning of sensations. This does not make the encounter with relics from the past, or with recreations, ‘inauthentic’, however. History is arguably always a sensory experience. While it might be impossible to experience the sensoriality of a different age, museums can create a sensibility for how the present informs an encounter with the remains and ideas of the past and how people in the past sensed differently. Understanding the past as an embodied experience as well as an intellectual one opens ways to respond to the widespread desire for an immersive experience while communicating the fundamental difference of the senses of the past. As such the past can help to convey a more general point about the cultural nature of the senses.
> Methods:
Reflective narratives
Across the network, the power and importance of reflective narratives emerged time and again. It might be an old-fashioned point to make – but regardless of the methods available to recreate certain physical sensations through analogue and digital means – often it appeared to participants that the sensory evocations available in the imagination through narration – in particular face to face – remained a particularly powerful and necessary tool for both a critical and imaginative experience.
This is equally true when it comes to framing the embodied experience of an original site (for example in the Gestapo Headquarter now housing Cologne’s Documentation on the Nazi period), or walking in modern recreations of past urban features (for instance when in the pleasure gardens in the Museums of London) and in particular in more classical displays that are limited to visual observation: For instance to understand the link between the senses and changes in the economic and social life of the city of Cologne a talk on the social history of a ‘herring box’ in a glass is more evocative than the recreation of its fishy smell could ever be.
Examples: Explore the images from our museum tours
> Links to talks/literature:
A range of talks from our Sensory Cities network illustrate the ways in which sources and objects can bring the past alive through their sensory evocations:
Stefan Lewejohann (Kölnisches Stadtmuseum)
Eigelstein: 'History and Curation'
Joan Roca (Director of the Barcelona’s City History Museum)
Displaying Urban History: Lessons Learned
Mateu Hernandez (CEO of Barcelona Global – Branding)
Barcelona’s reputation and the senses
Reading suggestions:
Behlen, B. & Supianek-Chassay, C. (2016) ‘Fashioning the Pleasure Garden: Creating an Immersive Display at the Museum of London’, in M. M. Brooks and D. D. Eastop (eds), Predicaments in Conserving and Displaying Dress: Contributions to a Theory of Practice, Getty Conservation Institute 2016.
