Please join us for our English Research Seminar at 2.30pm on 5th November on a project featuring Jade Munslow Ong, Simon Stanton-Sharma, Maire Tracey, Vashti Gbolagun Suwa, Liza Ryan-Carter. Please contact Prof. Caroline Magennis on c.magennis@salford.ac.uk for the venue and any further details.
The Unfinished Business of Astley Castle: Interdisciplinarity, Palimpsest and Contemporaneities
In 2024 our team received a Landmark Trust Futures award to make a short documentary film about Astley Castle. This RIBA Sterling award winning building comprises accommodation affixed inside the walls of a ruin. We will screen our film, titled Unfinished Business, and then talk about how we used the concept of the palimpsest to explore the multiple contemporaneities of the building; interlay visual, audio, poetic and theoretical textual components; and establish an interdisciplinary and collaborative working method necessary to represent Astley Castle on film. 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. The palimpsest therefore provides a model for engaging and representing the complex, heterotemporal heritage associated with historic buildings. We argue that through collaging filming techniques – working across disciplines as researchers, writers and filmmakers working simultaneously rather than chronologically in pre-production, production and editing, and by engaging embodied responses to the site we aim to represent – we translate the palimpsest into a production practice that results in a film without a single author, and which resists a single narrative about Astley Castle. Mobilisation of the palimpsest as interpretation, theory and method enabled our collaborative, interdisciplinary, non-hierarchical and non-linear working practice across researchers, filmmakers, and writers, and, when applied to a broader context, can also serve to enable other creative (re)imaginings of recorded and intangible heritage associated with historic buildings.
English Research Seminar on 5th November 2025 – The Unfinished Business of Astley Castle
