The dissolution of the monastery: negotiating text in place, entropy, ruins and light installations

Ruins are innately affective (Edensor, 2001, 2011) and this article explores how meaning is projected onto ruins through light. The paper interrogates intangible cultural heritage through notions of entropy, the process of disintegration and geographies of atmospherics and absence. We used projection mapping to shine disembodied text reflections about authenticity and heritage onto the material surface of St Augustine’s Abbey in Canterbury, once a place of significant pilgrimage and learning but is now an architectural ruin, part of a World Heritage Site. Our light installations created a further poetic entanglement in the process of dissolution and ruination by projecting the words used to describe the abbey back onto its surface. Qualitative research was conducted at two light interventions staged at St Augustine’s Abbey. These events continued the process of dissolving the past by accentuating the collapse of the physical structure, replacing it by a fantastical envelope of light. The findings confront the meaning of intangible heritage in the form of text in place and atmospheric transfiguration, mixing affective presence, present and past.