Maritime History in a Pocket: Intimate Heritage Encounters in a Homeless Environment

This article addresses the issues surrounding the agency of heritage objects and their affordances to heritage-based inclusion and meaningful, therapeutic encounters. Active citizen engagement and phenomenological, personal, and multisensory interactions with material heritage culture are sought after, but the practical implementations are scarce and frequently exclude marginalized groups. With this experimental study, the aim was to find out if an unstructured walk-in workshop could offer people experiencing homelessness a low-threshold method to participate, contribute, and feel included in heritage work. And what kind of responses would an intimate encounter with authentic mnemonics of local maritime cultural heritage — sailing ship era ballast stones — evoke? The experiment produced ephemeral, unforeseen moments on the cusp of local seafaring history, an escapist longing for the Stone Age, participants' childhood memories, jolly stone adoptions, and a realization that for cultural heritage to be genuinely accessible, it must be made available in a variety of easily reachable forms.