Some Things We Choose To Remember,
Some Things We Choose To Forget…

The context…

Snibston is an interactive museum in Coalville, Leicestershire – set on the site of a former colliery, with scheduled ancient colliery buildings and railway, outside play areas, the Century Theatre, and a one hundred acre country park and nature reserve. The museum displays a diverse and rich collection of historic objects telling the story of technology and design and how it has affected everyday life from the past to the present day, and the future.

Transform is a 2 year programme, funded by Arts Council England, at the heart of a regeneration programme for the site, commissioning artists to work with local people to produce work inspired by the history and heritage of the county and of the museum, creating new pieces for the site. The first artists selected to create new work are Paul Conneally, Jo Dacombe, Geoff Broadway and myself. A background paper from the outset of the project by Maurice Maguire can be downloaded here. The results of my work can be found here: http://www.brendanjackson.co.uk/some-things/ and what follows is a description of the process.

Digging for material…

Coal has been mined in this area of Leicestershire since medieval times, a time when illuminated manuscripts were a both a key source of storytelling and of information and mythologising. The town of Coalville did not develop until the 1820’s, when William Stenson sank a mine shaft on a farm alongside a track known as Long Lane in the parish of Whitwick. Snibston Colliery then opened in 1832 by George Stephenson, the railway pioneer. These pits were then worked until the 1980’s. They were the very reason for Coalville to exist. The site of Whitwick Colliery is now a Morrisons supermarket and Snibston has a new identity as a heritage site and visitor attraction.

My starting point has been conversations with the staff who work here along with objects in the stores collection, those objects currently not on – or never on – display, to construct a new kind of illuminated manuscript. (There are over a million objects stored in the Leicestershire museum service collections.) I began with some documentation over one day, a kind of day-in-the-life, from first thing in the morning when the cleaners came in through to the evening woodcraft session run by the Rangers for young people. It was an opportunity to find out about the scope of activities on the site and ask these two questions:

Do you have a favourite part of Snibston?

“The Eastern pit bank, looking down over the sports field…”

What would you like kept for posterity?

“My great grandfather’s silver police whistle…”

Rather like the coal that was once dug out of the ground here and used to produce heat and light, fragments of stories are unearthed and then this raw material will be reshaped – facts and fictions, memoir and flights of fancy – and then combined with photographic images for an installation on site.

One of the first things I came across…

In one side room in a main storage building is a dismantled ‘panopticon’ or – more accurately – the Kaiser Panorama, a large circular wooden device for viewing photographs. We know little about how it came to be here, other than it was ‘Left in store temporarily in 1969 by a Polish gentleman for about two weeks but never collected. Ownership vested in County council under Section 41 of the Local Government (Misc Provisions) Act 1982.’ One of the curators pulls this information off the database for me, describing this object:

- 12 double veneered and polished panels with brass eye pieces and electric cable, switches, etc.

- 2 single veneered and polished panels, one with etched glass in top half.

- Approx. 80 other pieces of wood, comprising mainly numbered circular joining pieces of wood and metal, padded and covered boards for leaning on, and unpolished wooden pieces for internal structure.

- Also, 4 metal curved pieces to form circle of gas jets with candle holders attached, and circular attachment with 13 hooks.

- Miscellaneous boxes contain black/white double image slides, extracts of German newsprint, etc.

- Found to be in reasonable condition, and treated for woodworm 22/04/98.

When fully assembled, around its circumference would have been 24 viewing stations, where you would sit and peer into stereoscope lenses of rear-illuminated stereoscopic photographic views, sometimes hand-tinted. An internal mechanical drum rotated every minute, so the viewer watched the views in sequence. These were images of what we might call ‘wonders of the world’.  (A working example exists in Warsaw on Al. Jerozolimskie, there called a ‘fotoplastikon’).

The particular model left in Snibston appears to have been still touring Austria between 1917 until as late as 1929, at a time when these kinds of viewing devices were being completely supplanted by moving pictures and the cinematographic technological supremacy of Eastman-Kodak.

The beautifully produced glass slides are wrapped in local flyers which advertised this attraction and so we know that on 12th October 1918 it was in Salzburg, where showed views of Bosnia and Herzegovina. On 13th December 1929, it was in a suburb of Vienna, where it showed ‘Landscapes and Cities of Alpine Countries’. The images surviving in their original boxes are of architectural and artistic marvels, spectacular landscapes and city views from Tsarist Russia, Italy, Germany, Greece, Constantinople and other great European capitals.

This device was the invention of August Fuhrmann in the early 1880’s. He was a German physicist, inventor and entrepreneur. He stated: “My invention is to satisfy up to date needs for instruction in visual arts for students and the public using 3D stereoscopic glass slides to show nature in its true form.” When the Panorama opened in Stockholm in October 1889 this visual attraction was advertised as “the cheapest and most comfortable way of traveling round the earth.”

Mr Fuhrmann sold hundreds of these viewing machines across the continent. He also had a ready ever-changing supply of the glass slides. (“For the first time extremely interesting: The Destruction of San Francisco. This week only: Soldiers on the Battlefields of Metz, Gravelotte etc. 24 pics on the ‘Life of Jesus’ in a super version 30 marks.”) In 1910 he is said to have controlled exhibitions in more than 250 branches across Europe. In the central archive up to 100,000 stereoscopic views were stocked, including one of the Tsar’s bedroom (above).

He also manufactured smaller automatic coin operated Kaiser Panoramas. “This machine made entirely out of metal has a precision clockwork mechanism that needs winding every 2 hours.  24 or 32 transparencies.  The lenses fold inside once the last picture has been shown.  Any sort of lighting inside. The money drops into an iron compartment with a safety lock.  Packing cases at cost. Machine costs 900 marks.  Will be prepared on order.  Delivery 8 weeks.”

This was a new way of seeing the world – “armchair journeys” was one description. Henry V. Hopwood, in the 1915 edition of his publication ‘Living Pictures’ (London: Optician & Photographic Trades Review) wrote of the gradual shift towards a more sophisticated kind of moving image:

“Putting technical matters aside for the moment, we may safely say that in 1899 the Living Picture was a popular music-hall “turn”. To-day it has established its own theatre, its own personnel, its own audience. Technical advance has been great. The more effective types of machines have been perfected; the actors of the day act for the screen, just as they do for the auditorium; a whole network of recording energy is spread over the entire world. In this year of grace the Living Picture is possessed of an organisation so complete, so far-spread, that its future existence and expansion is assured. It has entered into the life of the peoples; it has become a permanent part of their recreation and education. And yet, wonderful as has been the progress of the past twelve years, more wonderful still will be the coming decade. To-day we again stand looking to the future, as we did in ninety-nine. Then we hoped for the perfecting of the monochrome picture, and that has come. But to-day shows us the promise of reality itself.”

Franz Kafka visited one of these viewing devices and wrote about it in his diary. “Not entirely at ease there because I hadn’t prepared myself for such a fine establishment as I came across and I had gone in with snow covered boots, sitting in front of the viewer with the tips of my toes brushing the floor.  I had forgotten how the panorama worked and for a moment thought I had to move from one seat to the next.  An old man who was sitting by a small table reading “Illustrated World” by the light of a lamp ran the whole show.  After a while he put on a light for me.  Later two elderly women arrived and sat on my right, then another one came to my left.  Brescia, Cremona, Verona.  The people in the pictures looked like wax puppets with their feet fastened to the floor by plaster.  Gravestones: a woman with her train trailing over a low staircase opens a door a little and looks backwards.  A family: a boy at the front is reading, one hand on his temple; a boy on the right is flexing an unstrung bow.  A monument for the hero Tito Speri; neglected and inspiring with his clothes fluttering around his body.  Shirt, wide hat.  The pictures are more alive than at the cinema, because they allow the eyes the ‘peace of reality’.  In the cinema spectators are disturbed by the movement.  The peace of looking seems to be more important.  Smooth floors of cathedrals before us.  Why is there no merging of cinema and stereoscope? The distance between hearing the narration and seeing the panorama is greater than the distance between viewing the panorama and looking at reality.  Old Iron Market in Cremona.  At the end wanted to tell the old man how much I’d enjoyed it but didn’t dare.  Got the next programme.  Open from 10 to 10.”

- Franz Kafka, Kaiserpanorama, from his diaries 1910 – 1923.

Here then, was a way of seeing our world of wonders, at a time when everything was changing, technological innovations reshaping modes of culture and everyday living. While this particular Panorama was doing good business touring Austria, the Electric Theatre (in 1910) brought the marvel of moving pictures to Coalville. The Stage reported in June the following year that there was “no need to make the tiresome journey to London to see the Coronation” as it “afforded on Friday excellent views of the Coronation Procession, the pictures being as distinct as they were varied”. The world grew a little smaller, year by year.

This is the story so far. What stories are weaved within these objects of the distant and not so distant past and our relationship to them? What will we reveal to our audience?