This installation was a collaboration with Sarah Rubidge. Here’s what we wrote about it at the time:
Hidden Histories, created for the newly refurbished Theatre Royal, Winchester, explores the dialogue between past and present.
The Theatre Royal, Winchester lies on a site that has a recorded history which reaches back to the Iron Age. The site of the theatre was within sight of the old North Gate, which was embedded in the walls of both Roman and Medieval Winchester. In the 12th and 13th centuries. St Saviour’s church occupied the site. It has also periodically hosted a bustling market, medieval tenement houses, and was a garden in both medieval times and the 19th century. Later it became a hotel and more recently a cinema and a thriving local theatre. It is said that the ghosts of the past have been seen, heard, and felt in the theatre for many years.
In this installation the flow of the theatre’s history is ruptured as several pasts and the present permeate a single moment. Liminal traces of the site’s past are projected on to the walls, using prerecorded and manipulated digital imagery. These are integrated with manipulated live images of 21st century visitors to the installation and augmented by an electro-acoustic sound score which also bears echoes of the past. Through overlaying the two sets of images, past and present mingle in the projections, the ‘ghosts’ of this ancient site infiltrating the present, and the traces of the immediate present intruding on its past.
