The Ableism of Networks / Recovery Time is Labour Time
Collective, Edinburgh
Two texts written for the Not Going Back to Normal project and published in the Disabled Artists Manifesto.
Polemical pamphlets for feral distribution as we venture out of lockdown. Leave on bus seats and cafe tables, between magazines on news stands and stuffed between the pages of library books. Wherever you want to leave a reminder that things were never normal and we are not going back there.
A study of the Raik Road area in Aberdeen looking at its development since the end of the Ice Age through the lens of metabolic animism. This looks at the area as a site of metabolic flows and processes considering how the land and human and more-than-human lifeforms shape and are shaped within these. Natural resources, labour and culture act upon one another. This is seen most typically in relation to changing forms of food production but also in areas such as the oil industry.
The project consisted of an exhibition, public workshops and publication.
A collection of four essays written as part of the Frontiers in Retreat residency at the Scottish Sculpture Workshop in Lumsden.
The essays include: ‘The Uncommonality of the Commons’, ‘The Biconditionality of Craft and Kraft’ and the two-part essay ‘On a Proletarian Soil’ which is written in the style of a walker’s guide following routes to two destinations on the outskirts of Lumsden. The essays explore and question the relations between politics and nature through sources ranging from Aristotle’s Athenian Constitution to Robert Kirk’s Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies and drawing on the work of Donna Haraway, Sarah Jacquette Ray and Alexander Reid Ross.
Grafting exercise. Part of Promiscuous Pipelines a work session about modularity in software processes as an “articulation between the universal and the particular” (Chantal Mouffe in: The Return of the political, 1993) hosted by Constant VZW and FoAM, Brussels.
The title, Generating All Trees, comes from an essay by the computer science pioneer Donald Knuth and the work itself was based on the grafting of tree branches from a random walk in one of Brussel's woodland parks.
Excursions into the Negative Field
Cesura//Acceso
A visual essay published in Cesura//Acceso, journal of music, politics and poetics.
The essay juxtaposes conflicting tensions between creative pedagogy, behavioural modelling and free improvisation drawing on extracts from the work of Maria Montessori, the Arts and Crafts schools of the 1900s, and 1970s educational psychology.
The Uncommonality of the Commons
New Glasgow Society, Glasgow
Transcript of a talk originally presented as part of Estovers Part 1: Urban and Rural, Historical and Contemporary, Commons and the Common a public discussion produced and chaired by Emma Balkind.
Stackwalker is a collection of interviews collected over a period from August 2008 to June 2010. Most were recorded in the Hebrides and the North East of Scotland, with others in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and London. The material explored current forms of self-organised production in rural Scotland, the relationship of these to law and nature, and the various localised, often informal, forms of governance and social structure within which these exist. In particular, the project focused on the parallels between the experiences modern-day migrant workers in these areas and the impacts of migration and economic restructuring that many of these areas have experienced in the past.
A version of the film footage combined with transcripts of the interviews was presented as part of the exhibition Fields, Factories and Workshop, at the CCA: Center for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, in August and September 2010. The film version was accompanied by music by Hanna Tuulikki, a set of vocal works composed from fragments of songs gathered from people in the locations where the interviews were made.
Stackwalker: Interviews 2008-2010
CCA: Glasgow
A book edition of the interview material from Stackwalker was published in 2012 by CCA:Glasgow, entitled Stackwalker: Interviews 2008-2010 (ISBN: 9 780956 271389) and distributed by Cornerhouse Publications.
The subject matter unfolds from the bottom up, one interview leading to the contacts that became the basis for later interviews. Over the course of this process, the perspectives of the people speaking changes. Initially, more first-hand personal experiences were collected. As a whole, the interviews do not present a portrait of any one particular group of people, but rather are a complex of statements, offering many aspects of a process that is not easily bounded in terms of specific identities, periods, or contexts.
A series of walks exploring the idea of the commons as it is understood and experienced today based around commons areas in Kinson, Townsend and West Howe in Bournemouth. These included an ancient historical commons that was the inspiration for Thomas Hardy, a new reclaimed commons woodland and the public green spaces of a council estate. The walks used photography and sound recording as a way of capturing and presenting responses to the areas and ideas of the project.
Free Social Foundations
FutureSonic, Manchester
A mapping of the current condition of spaces of free and open assembly in our cities, gathered from interviews and research with people in Manchester and Salford including the legacy of the Hulme squats, new collectivist approaches to allotments and the private policing of Manchester town centre. This was published as a free broadsheet that was distributed on an illegal walk through the city centre and back to Hulme.
Given To The People is a film about the Pollok Free State. The Free State was initiated by the actions of a local resident, Colin Macleod, who began a tree top protest against the building a motorway through public woodlands in Pollok, Glasgow, in the early 1990s. Over several years this grew into a series of camps across the Pollok estate. The Free State sought not only to block an unwanted motorway cutting through one of Europe's largest inner city public commons, land that had been gifted to the people of Glasgow, but also raised issues over the rights of local people to determine the use and development of public space.
The film brings together interviews with a number of the participants and an archive of photographic material from the campaign. It was made with the support of the GalGael, an organization that grew out of the Free State, and features music specially composed for the film by Foxface.
