新作坊 Humanity Innovation and Social Practice

This paper discusses methods for the cultural translation of the architectural heritage of Matsu’s rare and dense network of wartime underground bunkers. It explores how to enable visitors to perceive the historical environmental changes of the battlefield and issues of cultural sustainability through spatial narratives and the search for authentic texts.

The Matsu fortifications and military cultural landscape form an integrated military heritage site that was formally registered as a military cultural asset in 2021. Confronting the complex culture of the fortifications and their multiple possible translations, this paper seeks to uncover the perceptual and interpretive content of authentic texts, as well as the features and significance of the cultural landscape of the bunkers. This research is mainly concerned with the multiple repairs of the site’s lifeworld and focuses on the spatial narrative and embodied perceptual experiences of participants. Through interviews with islanders and an examination of childhood memories written in Matsu literature, we investigated what remains of the island’s original “genetic code” in the context of the current site of the fortifications. Meanwhile, we think about the historical narrative and the context of military governance of the island during the Cold War. What makes the island the way it is now? Through discourse analysis and narrative research, a design discourse method is used to translationally reinterpret the site. Translating authentic texts as a ‘platform of understanding’ constitutes the process of mediation, thereby extracting the agency of perceived space. Narrative is also regarded as a cultural and social action, through which public understanding, the production of subjective experience, and the process of self-education occur. This allows us to explore the functions and impacts of the multifaceted architectural translations of the Matsu battlefield site.