Lina Lee

The objective of my museum intervention is to restore the ruins of Clandon Park without drastically changing its identity as a symbol and expression of the 'Event of Fire' which was a critical moment in the history of Clandon Park House.

The house was badly damaged by fire in April 2015, caused by an electrical fault in the basement, leaving it 'essentially a shell', with only one room, the Speaker's Parlour, intact.

As a consequence of the fire, thousands of living historical traces – salvage discoveries, fragments and saved findings – remained in the building. Every single item has not only wide-reaching consequences for the interaction between the past, present and the future of the building, but also in interweaving these different strands of time. In this context, ‘remembering’ and ‘keeping’ these living traces as a museum collection on site becomes the primary function of the space.

This is done by offering visitors an experience of paying attention to the memory of individual items: since it is always a reinterpretation as well as a new understanding of what was already understood, the same past is remembered and interpreted again and again in their own ways.