Representations of an Imagined Past: fairground heritage villages

This paper is concerned with groups of historic vernacular buildings, assembled and displayed as 'villages' at agricultural fairgrounds. These are grassroots versions of open-air museums and heritage sites developed by public institutions and private foundations. The fairground heritage village structures are usually collected by volunteers and moved to existing county or state fairgrounds, then used in similar ways as professionally managed sites. The location and situation offer certain advantages, but also present problems that stem from being authentic structures presented as a fictional village. Because narrative, scale and editing are factors in the conflict, adding an outward-directed layer of interpretation would visually reconnect the dislocated buildings with their original sites. This is intended to destabilise the past as a fixed, isolated place, and link the village display to landscape change in the region.