Space is sedimented, closed, open, multiple, layered, iterative, plural and mobile. How does one proliferate indexicality as an experimental spatial practice of what a civic cathedral has been and could become. I have spiralled down the staircase to the archives sitting under the nave of Coventry Cathedral, coming up for the air space offered by receptive collaborators. Possibilities for experimentation, for thinking outside of the box, are ignited through a site-specific collaborative fellowship. A growing connecting mesh of relations alters the indexicality of space.

This project approaches experiments as spinning tops from the past, spiralling towards what the civic life of a cathedral can become. Coventry Cathedral is an internationally recognised post-war modernist architectural site, with changing contours of peace and reconciliation. The word experiment runs throughout the archives, appearing in different constellations, in spatial arrangements of music, art, drama, ecology, theology, civic and global relations. Here, experiments from the past are treated as propositions for prompting imaginative possibilities. The spatial practices enacted involve rooms, letters, models, rock, acorns, animals, gardens, photos and conversations constituting a ‘living archive’ (Hall, 2001). Stretching what could be possible, as well as what was possible, I look back at experiments to spark up the could be, amongst sedimented im/possibilities.

This book dwells on the process of undertaking a spatial practice in re-orientating a site via experimental and collaborative methods. Coventry Cathedral has notably been studied for the modernist architecture and the works of established artists, such as Graham Sutherland’s large tapestry, which was dyed and woven by women in Aubusson, France. Or John Hutton’s engravings of saints and angels on the West Screen, with the energetic angels on the top row humorously referred to as the footballer angels by the workmen building the cathedral. Emergent methods prevail for dwelling on uncomfortable topics; re-routing familiar inhabitations of the cathedral; facilitating multi-lingual assemblages; and altering spatial manifestations of listening, through sustained practices and relationships.

I draw on a heterodoxy of spatial practices, alongside a carrier bag of smaller stories (Guha, 1994), sitting on the edges of the usual epic stories, as suggested by Ursula Le Guinn (1989). This engagement meddles with how the big, repeated stories of the cathedral are framed, by developing a global planetary (Tsing et al, https://feralatlas.org/) experimental indexicality, of what is out of the frame, by re-hearing the very here. To hear the here, with a different accent to the assenting sound of “hear, hear!” in the political chamber of Westminster. Swimming against the tide of the big H in narrative history, red herrings muddle the waters of how we tell about society (Becker, 2007).

Taking what may be peripheral to the ordering of stories and of materials, the project introduces an alternative de-tour of site-specific relationships. Different kinds of matters of care (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017), are kindled in the fertile grounds of the archives, as I rummage in boxes and open shelves. By reading both along and against the grain (Stoler, 2008), I squirrel between regularised indexicalities. Glimpses, hints, and minor figures are part and parcel of rendering research. The task enfolds multiplying leads, which spiral in and around the cathedral through tentacles of creative collaboration.

An experimental indexicality of relations, with an expanded notion of material archives, always in fellowship with a pluriversity of specialist knowledge makers – artists, academics and intervenors in community engagements, is spun through exercises in the arts of ‘contact zones’ (Pratt, (1991;1992). The initiatives have been made possible by a British Academy Innovation Fellowship on ‘Multicultural Experiments in the Civic Life of a Cathedral’. Fellowship is interpreted as an on-going, open-ended, camaraderie of exchange and dialogue. A supportive and challenging space of co-learning, forged in a back-and-forth relationship of call-and-response (Puwar and Sharma, 2012), between different kinds of materials, places, people and the non-human, as companion thinkers (Stengers et al, 2014). In this fellowship, I have been spurred on to re-imagine an ecology of public-intellectual practices in a multi-species re-worlding.

Fellowship is harnessed, by becoming a connector with a network of guests and creators who have improvised and innovated with me, both in the moment, as well as with extensive preparation. Gatherings and guests enable the public sphere of a civic cathedral to become a temporary ‘home’ by hosting a podcast series and incubating multicultural experiments, whilst spinning out from archives bearing the past to future speculative space making of civic life. This has been a juggling journey. Multicultural experiments from the past can at times offer bold prompts for what the civic life of a cathedral has been and can become.

I approached this project as a transversal interlocutor (Yuval-Davis, 1999), moving between the lines of academia and the cathedral, undertaking the journey of becoming a partially trusted critical sympathetic eye. This project is not researching the cathedral from a distance, however there is a distance to travel. My approach comes from an elsewhere, for instance with companion archivists, such as Mari Takayanagi, from Parliamentary Archives or Althea Greenan at the Women’s Art Library, in Goldsmiths. I engage with innovative methods on space, dialogue, multiculturalism and de-coloniality, whilst juggling being a critical outsider, with a shape shifting relationship on the inside. I am looking inside an organisation, by finding clues and enchantment in the archives, making the familiar strange (Back and Sinha, 2018), as I work from uneven groundings.

I did not expect to find a ready-made box of files, very few researchers do when they follow the threads of their research nose. Some may suggest there is nothing of relevance here and to look elsewhere. Nonetheless I tentatively negotiate my passageway through the archives, treading carefully. I move through a criss-crossing network of catalogued boxes and a plethora of open shelf or unfiled materials, absolutely connected to multicultural lives, depending on how you imagine this to be. There is unsurprisingly a longstanding global connectedness from here to elsewhere (Bhambra, 2014). One full of ‘discrepant multiculturalism’s’ as stated by Barnor Hesse (2000). I am soon treading archival waters, juggling my un/timely presence.

Boundary markers take on different forms in borderlands. By feeling my way through a research habitat, understood as an ecology of practices by Stengers, I need to feel out the borders of the environment, recognising limits, whilst also pushing against them, to re-establish them again and again (Stengers, 2005: 184). Hélène Frichot emphasises borders and limits do not necessitate a line of defence, crucially for Stengers, they provide a “generous threshold of exploration, a reaching out, an experimental groping.” (2017:147).

I don’t want to take possession of a box, to claim it as only my territory, which is a research trap beset with the anxieties of individualised scholarship. I am interested in enabling thinking together, through conversations and fellowships of making. The fabric of connections across the social, cultural and political life of the cathedral, especially in the sixties and seventies, surprises and draws me and many collaborators in. The threads are inter-linked but also broken, providing rich connections in the threshold of exploration and experimental groping (aka Stengers, 2017).

As a response to being situated as a “disrupter”, as stated by an internal collaborator, I click into my capacity to mobilise as a connector, borne out of years of hosting inter-disciplinary events, workshops, installations and different modes of public engagement. This is a case of reaching out when a trouble shooter has become the trouble. Donna Haraway states academic work is partly a case of ‘Staying with the Trouble’ (2016), sitting with a “method alert to off-the-beaten-path practices” (p.127). Other ways of doing things with odd-kin, as Haraway puts it, can cultivate response-ability, nurturing and cultivating collaboratively.

Additionally, slow mediative presence becomes a way of sitting with the trouble, especially on my unstable grounds. There is much to be said on ‘staying power’, as articulated by Peter Fryer (1984), with respect to histories of migration. I slowly and surely touch booklets, papers, slides and boxes, connecting them with a web of relations outside the archives. A process of activation spirals a trail of new possibilities. My companion thinkers are architextures and knowledge makers, sparking unexpected points of ignition.

Making space for ‘speculative futures’ (Savransky et al, 2017) and afro-futurism (Eshun, 1998) this project has involved a series of exchanges. Academics, artistic and community heritage practitioners have responded generously to the question—What can a cathedral become? Experimental thinking and practices are facilitated through contact with archives and specific architectural points in Coventry Cathedral. Different types of materials are activated anew, forging ‘archives of feelings’ (Cvetkovich, 2003) to initiate together. Referring to queer music and cultural scenes, Cvetkovich reflects that the “story of how conversations happen and how work gets made out of those conversations is important.” (2013:2). For Hear Here, the process sits in the middle of an inter-disciplinary sense making for how a ‘living archive’ develops connections on the move with people and materials as infrastructure, interwoven in a palimpsest of relations and materials. Provocations (Pangrazio 2017) form the grounds for future collaborations so that the experiments proposed can actually be fleshed out.

An indexicality of relations operates as an activating device, navigating reader visitors to hear the here from a tilted approach. Rock, Acorn, Soil, Industry, Unity, Study, Sight and Sound, are assembled for a sideways way-in to the cathedral. There is a tilting re-orientation, with alternate directions of travel. Layering and de-layering ruffles feathers, whilst unsettling sedimented approaches, by working with others Along the Archival Grain (Stoler, 2010). Engaging in what Tina Campt has termed ‘listening to images’ (2017) and texts to decipher the atmospheres and experiments of past practices, which come from making the archive a temporary working home (Hartman, 2018).

Operating with the notion of slow and embedded change, re-visiting what has been enacted in the past, springboards innovative approaches to generate the ‘pedagogical arts of contact zones’ (Pratt, 1991). Mobilising the capacities of a connector between a pluriversity of knowledges (Escobar, 2017). Collaboration as an evolving call-and-response (Puwar and Sharma, 2012) develops through a network of invitations to engage with site-specific elements, as well as paper archives. Live material archives, of paper, rock, soil, acorn, sound and image, are activated as catalysing resources, for re-visiting pasts often not fully registered. Engaged in an ‘ecology of practices’ (Stengers, 2005a), space is made for new connections and new possibilities as processes of co-learning and mobilising.

Institutions are complex places with multiple tensions and strains jostling alongside each other. Various departments have been highly receptive towards unknown or overlooked peripheral aspects of histories. The events and engagement teams in the cathedral have taken up the partnership of opening the narratives of the space to a plurality of journeys and perspectives. They have forged receptive links with my intervention and presence [see the podcast with Nitano Muller], furthering their approach to holding courageous conversations [see the event held on 19.09.25]. There is an interest in delving into the archives as a resource for generating bold thinking on how to connect with diverse populations in the city through creative projects facilitating the art of dialogue and collaboration [see the Conversations with Georgia Cowie and Ruth Lubrano Lavadera].

There is for instance, an Events Manifesto, which includes the prioritisation of collaborations with a super diverse city population in a sustained way. Sections of the institution are searching and pitching for ways to experiment with initiatives challenging accepted practices, whilst taking inspiration from the visionary programme of activities during the sixties and seventies, many of which remain invisible to cathedral staff, as well as to the general public. Hence their manifesto states: ‘We want to maintain the spirit of our original event programme by continuing to celebrate ideas, excellence and new thinking. This legacy will influence our programming choices.’ (2020: 8)

The team are seeking to mobilise fresh thinking, with an ethos for “the cathedral space to be transformative and used to its fullest potential." (2020:9). Hear Here reads this manifesto as a prompt, an invitation for brave and bold ideas, as multiscalar initiatives, respond to the architectural space and narratives of the cathedral. The cultivation of new stories is a central objective of the manifesto, through programming and co-curation, with publics who don’t automatically see the cathedral as their civic space. Within this broader manifesto, cathedral archives can both register multicultural experiments, as well as to use what is found in the archives to innovate new planetary contact zones.

The new modernist cathedral sits in the middle of the city centre, side-by-side with the ruins of the old cathedral from WW2 bomb damage, a symbol of conflict and reconciliation. Several academic projects have studied the architectural history of the place. The relationship to the city was designed by Basil Spence into the fabric of the building, through the circular glass building of the Chapel of Industry, which looks on to a developing and changing city. The manifesto emphasises that “Brick by brick, we were built for the people of Coventry” (2020: 9), whilst recognising the discrepancy between the people who migrated to the city at the time of the building in the sixties and, their sense of connection to the place. Workers who physically built the cathedral included people from the colonies, though their labour and presence is a scramble to find, in the histories of this iconic place in the city. Alongside more recent waves of global migration, the cathedral has attempted to embrace the City of Sanctuary status granted to Coventry. The team are aware of the sustained work required to shift who feels they belong, as well as how they belong.

A global and planetary connectedness requires reading ‘along the grain’ (Stoler, 2009) of how history has been told from here. A contrapuntal method of reading can be extended to architecture, from its application to literature by Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism (1993), emphasising what is only marginally registered, even though it is heavily draws on it. Basil Spence was for instance born in India (in 1907) and educated until the age of 13 at John Connon School, operated by the Bombay Scottish Education Society, before being sent to be educated in Edinburgh. Colonial entanglements continued throughout his life and career. Spence spent one year working in the London practice of Edwin Lutyens, who played an enormous part in the colonial shaping of colonial India, including the Viceroy’s House in New Delhi, a project Spence was closely involved in. He went on to design three pavilions for the Empire Exhibition in Glasgow (1938).

The move to address colonial histories through processes of interpretative de-colonisation (Verges, 2020), involves working with entangled relations across time and space, shifting towards possibilities for hospitality (Diprose, 2012) and a cosmopolitan art of listening (Back, 2007), amidst what the cultural theorist Paul Gilroy (2004) refers to as “post-colonial melancholia” after Empire. A play of vernaculars and arts of dialogue (Portelli, 2018), offer potential for shifting connections and possibilities. It is in the plural site-specific play of space, as noted in the Production of Space (1991) by the theorist Henri Lefebvre, where ‘new situations’ can emerge, in the inter-play and frictions of contact zones (Pratt, 1992).

Tensions within and between communities of race, faith, class, gender and sexualities, are part and parcel of what the post-colonial feminist Lata Mani has called Contentious Traditions (2008). “Communities” are not homogenous, but full of what Avtar Brah, in Cartographies of a Diaspora (1996) identifies, as criss-crossing solidarities and struggles. Working from emergent methodologies, attentive to moving the grounds, a series of workshops, public events, and a podcast series titled ‘Hear Here’ dwell on past spatial practices, to spur on new possibilities. There is both an ‘art of dialogue’ as noted by Alessandro Portelli (2018), as well as site-specific call-and-response to materials, place and time periods. New inhabitations mobilise a rich interdisciplinary body of practices. The challenge presented by the wish to open institutional narratives and to foster different connections to an established institution, by shifting between the local, global and planetary, creates overlapping cultural forms of public engagement.

The material arrangement of the book, spatially and temporally, moves through a series of interlinked writings, podcasts, conversations and short videos. Collaboration and experimentation are braided (Kimmerer, 2013) through each of the inter-connected pieces. The format is inspired by the Sukhdev Sandhu’s Night Haunts (2010), which was released over the duration of several months, as ethnographic observations with night workers in London, for the artistic website hosted by Artangle, before it became a widely read book. Les Back’s method for his book Academic Diary (2016) has additionally informed the scale and tempo of the writing, which was written as a blogpost, before it was published as a book to be read from any page.