Methodology
Site-integrity is a site-specific, process-driven research methodology developed by Julie Marsh that positions artistic practice as a reflexive mode of knowledge production grounded in embodied, place-based enquiry. Drawing on Doreen Massey’s (2006) understanding of place as a shifting interplay of social, material and symbolic relations, site-integrity conceives filmmaking as a collective, site-responsive practice.
Building on art historian, theorist and curator Miwon Kwon’s paradigms of site-specificity—the phenomenological, the institutional and the discursive—site-integrity proposes a fourth paradigm: the performative. In this understanding, site is not a fixed location but an emergent field of relations continually reconfigured through lived experience, exchange and the co-production of meaning.
A distinctive feature of the methodology is the use of custom motorised recording and playback devices that facilitate a recursive exchange between filming and (re)presentation. Recorded material is returned to, and activated within, the locations where it was originally captured. In doing so, the device operates as an interface, a dynamic network or system of exchange. By situating the viewer in the centre of a changing live space, there is never a point of fixed representation. Site-integrity repositions the act of representation from its retrospective or projective dimensions towards that which is performed and is experiential.
The site-integrity methodology was first introduced in the Journal for Artistic Research (JAR) 2019 and further expanded in Scene, Volume 11, 2023. This co-creative approach also extends to the creation of digital, living archives that empower communities to narrate their own spaces as living, emergent entities. This offers an affective, relational experience that moves beyond traditional modes of representation, explored in the International Journal of Islamic Architecture – The Urgency of the Digital, 2025.
ZOROASTRIAN CENTRE LONDON
VARIOUS SITES ALICANTE
STAFFORDSHIRE STREET GALLERY LONDON
BRICK LANE MOSQUE LONDON
OLD KENT ROAD MOSQUE LONDON
APPLIED ARTS PAVILION VENICE
CHECKPOINT 300 WEST BANK PALASTINE
RIO CINEMA LONDON
TRAIN DEPOT KRAKOW