Ok, enough placeholders. From now on, you will hear from me directly and not mediated via the cut and paste of quotations, images and links. This means that the books that prompt these words – which I dictate to my faithful librarian for you to read – will now be moved into the background. Since […]
Realized in close collaboration with a wide range of artists, academics, writers, students, community activists and interested members of the public, these projects attempt to ‘think outwards’ from a somewhat peripheral ethnographic exhibition, and the histories that have produced it, towards a collective investigation of the connections, resonances, resitances and possible sites of transformation that […]
By the end of the [18th] century the ‘window attitude’ of women marked their status. Upper-class women were not to be seen at the front of the window or to be seated in an open window, acts from which lower-class women were not yet restrained. – Manfredo Di Robilant, Niklas Maak, Rem Koolhaas, AMO, Harvard […]
There is this reality that Scots played a role in colonisation, and this other aspect that Scotland is very much a part of many Inuit communities. In my homeland, Nunavik, the Inuit region of northern Quebec, the ties with Scotland are old and recent, happy and unhappy, intended and coincidental. Family names in my home […]
I film a lot wherever I am so both films have parts shot in Scotland, Africa or the Caribbean, and they’re meant to create these linkages between these places, but also to try to speak about refuge. Is it possible to even have refuge? I am still haunted by the idea of these people left […]
In a similar gesture, Douglas Gordon’s Under Darkness, Between Shadows (2000), hovered over the city. I first heard rumours of this work in the 1990s, and included it in Justified Sinners (co-edited with Ross Birrell, 2002), an anthology surveying the archaeology of Scottish counter-culture, of which Gordon’s darkness marked an endpoint. ‘Under Darkness, Between Shadows’ is a proposal to […]
Architectural ruins and dematerialised art objects share their sense of potential with the archaeological traces of dùn (fort), suidhe (seats), temples, cup-and-ring marked rocks and shieling. These dark relics have offered poets and artists mytho-poetic conspectus to conjure new-and-yet-older Scotlands. For instance, the landscape installations, performances and projections created by Angus Farquhar’s NVA are ambitious projects that riff off […]
These days we meet and talk in underground chambers, beneath the ruins of our former institutions; all we have left are our human resources…[C]atastrophes do not mean the end of the human needs embodied by museums, even if we do not use that name. What matters is collective memory: not only the memories of experts […]
