Resonate (ii) Touring Open Studio - XR and Heritage

In 2025, Play Office travelled to Cairo to present Resonate II, Open Studio at Medrar for Contemporary Art, sharing a live snapshot of a Portsmouth-based programme in motion. This was not a finished exhibition shipped from one context to another, it was an open studio, a working process, and an invitation, to test how a project shifts when it meets a new city, a new audience, and new questions.

Medrar’s programme framed Resonate II through a powerful provocation, can interpretation itself become a form of preservation? If collections stay open to creative engagement and reinterpretation, can they remain relevant, equitable, and alive beyond the confines of the archive?

For 2025, three artists explored the archives of the Mary Rose Trust, King Henry VIII’s flagship that sank in 1545 and was raised from the seabed in 1982.

The Mary Rose was one of the most advanced warships of the 16th century. After sinking suddenly during battle, it lay buried in the silt of the Solent for over 400 years. That oxygen-poor environment preserved the ship’s timbers and thousands of objects remarkably well, creating one of the most complete archaeological collections from the Tudor period. Over 19,000 artifacts were recovered, including weapons, tools, clothing, medical instruments, and personal belongings, offering an unusually detailed picture of life aboard a Tudor warship.

For us, this archive is not only a historical record, it is a living material, dense with labour, conflict, survival, care, and technology. It holds rare insight into 16th-century craftsmanship and daily life, and it also raises present-day questions about who gets to interpret heritage, and how.

The Mary Rose collection is housed in Portsmouth, a city shaped by maritime history, where naval life is embedded in the identity of its residents. Resonate II set out to reframe and expand that history, inviting new voices to find meaning inside it, and to push against the idea that archives only belong to specialists.

As Thomas Buckley writes,

“In a city which holds its past as closely as Portsmouth does it’s vital we open space for artists to butt heads with what we think our past tells us about who we can be now.

By boldly exploring technologies which feel almost like science fiction we can open up a potential space for re-invention and reinvigoration, where the monoliths of identity that form our understanding of who we are in relation to the world can be made more gentle. Decentralising interpretations of our past means we gain a soft power, the power to form new and needed connections to heritage and position the sharp tool of technology as a way we can draw empathy making lines between one another in the silt.”

That spirit, butt heads, decentralise, reinvent, carried through the open studio in Cairo.

Touring changes work. It introduces friction, translation, misreadings, new alignments, and unexpected intimacy. Bringing a Portsmouth-rooted archive project to Cairo opened new space around the politics of preservation, who the archive serves, what is remembered, what is erased, and what it means to keep history open rather than sealed.

The open studio format made that visible. Instead of presenting heritage as a fixed narrative, Resonate II presented it as a site of ongoing negotiation, where technology can be used not for spectacle, but for experimentation, empathy, and new forms of connection.

Thank you to Medrar for hosting Resonate II in Cairo, and for creating the conditions for genuine exchange, where process is valued, and where questions stay open.