The Unfinished Business of Astley Castle: interdisciplinarity, palimpsest and contemporaneities

In this article, we explain how we used the concept of the palimpsest to establish an interdisciplinary and collaborative Practice Research method for representing on film the intangible heritage associated with historic buildings – in this case, Astley Castle, a RIBA Sterling Award-winning building in Warwickshire. In contemporary use, the palimpsest refers broadly to anything that contains multilayered records of alterations and developments over time, whilst retaining traces of earlier forms. It therefore serves as a model for engaging and representing the complex, heterotemporal recorded and intangible heritage of various and multiform objects, buildings and sites. In the making of our film, Unfinished Business, the palimpsest provided three things: a way to structure our working practice; a means to explore the multiple contemporaneities of Astley Castle; and inspiration for the interlaying of visual, audio, poetic and theoretical textual components that we used to respond to location on film. We argue that through collaging filming techniques – working across disciplines as researchers, writers and filmmakers concurrently rather than chronologically in pre-production, production and editing, and by engaging embodied responses to the site represented – we translate the palimpsest into an ethical production practice that results in a film without a single author, and which resists a single narrative about Astley Castle. Mobilization of the palimpsest as interpretation, theory and method enabled our collaborative, interdisciplinary, non-hierarchical and non-linear working practice across researchers, filmmakers, and writers. When applied to a broader context, this Practice Research method can also serve to enable other creative, (re)imaginings of recorded and intangible heritage associated with historic buildings.