For 700 years, God’s House Tower has stood resiliently within the walls of Southampton, acting over the centuries as a platform for firing cannons, housing the town’s prisoners and eventually as a museum. Yet for all the history of the tower, there is one noticeable absence – the record of a single women who ever passed through its gateway.
However, a project to restore the ancient tower has prompted one artist to attempt to overturn the “gross gender imbalance” this weekend, and invite, for one day only, 700 women to occupy the space.
Sarah Filmer is one of eight artists who will take up residency in God’s House Tower over the next two years as it is restored into a gallery and art space, with the help of heritage Lottery Funding.
Yet before the building began, Filmer, a performance artist, said she wanted to find a way to right the wrongs of “700 years of ignored female history”.
She has invited women from groups across the city – from the Women’s Institute to running clubs, local choirs and even the Southampton Bollywood dancers – to pass through God’s House Tower on Saturday and have their presence recorded, whether it’s through a photograph or a drawing, or by filling out a card with a story from their life. Men invited to the event will also be encouraged to write down stories of significant women in their life – and they will also be counted among the 700.
“The whole notion of medieval Southampton excludes women completely,” said Filmer. “There’s no value attributed to their contribution at all.”
She added: “One person – a man, I should point out – did say to me: ‘Well what’s it going to change? What difference does it make?’. But it’s symbolic and for me anything that sparks off those conversations and gets people to address how problematic and gendered our history is is worthwhile.
“It gives women a louder voice in the world and that is still so important. I mean, who thought that in 2016 we’d still have to be fighting constantly for our equal place in the world?”
British-Egyptian writer and poet Sabrina Mahfouz will also be running a workshop at the event and then staging a performance in the day.
For Filmer, the project is as much about creating a new legacy for God’s House Tower, as well as the powerful act of bringing 700 women into a space previously defined only by men. The drawing and photographs from the day will form the basis of future exhibitions once the building becomes a functioning gallery space in 2018, but Filmer also has plans to make the records of women a physical part of the building.
Filmer said: “Over the centuries, there’s a lot of history of women concealing things within building walls. People don’t really know why, whether it was to ward off evil spirits or make a recording of things that wouldn’t otherwise have been recorded. So when the building is developed, some of the legacy outputs from this day will be embedded in the walls of this building. It means, from here on in, women will forever be physically present in God’s House Tower.”
The redevelopment of God’s House Tower, which for years has sat empty after the archeology museum it once housed was shut, is part of a project by Dan Crow to restore forgotten spaces in Southampton for creative purposes.
It was Crow who spent two years raising funds for the restoration of God’s House Tower, and he who invited Filmer and seven other artists to occupy the space while the development is happening.
“God’s House Tower is the most significant project we’ve ever taken on, in terms of the money we’ve raised, the scale of the restoration and the cultural aspirations we have for the building,” said Crow.
“It’s an entirely new phase for the building and Sarah’s response to its history, and her attempts to overturn that gender imbalance, feels like the right way to mark a new, modern beginning for God’s House Tower.”
