Else-where/s
Welcome to the last post on this residency. It has been cathartic to place thoughts here that have been festering for some time.
Glasgow is an incredibly saturated city with regards to it's historical and contemporary legacies of socio-cultural toil. Rich in both identity and matter, it has been stretched, tugged, pulled, shifted and sprawled across further lands in order to garner it's city status.
Forgotten sites still pockmark the geological and social topology of the land here. Before starting this residency, a good friend and fellow artist based in Glasgow, Consuelo Rosa Servan, spoke to me of a place I hadn't heard of within the city limits: Sighthill. Consuelo had been facilitating workshops there as part of a regeneration project set to capture the imaginations of the Sighthill community.
Built as an estate during the high-rise boom of the late sixties, the buildings erected in Sighthill were grouped together, which is what is known as a 'scheme'. Schemes had multiplied in Glasgow during this time, with concrete and steel-work erupting from where established slum housing used to exist. This was the first displacement of human and matter - from crowded 2 room occupancies to pre-fabricated maisonettes with indoor bathrooms. At the time it seemed a miracle to those who went from sharing one room with six other members of their family to having their own bedroom and toilet to boot. However, displaced people need support in order to re-root their lives elsewhere. They need shops, a post office, recreational spaces and continued development funds from the council in order to sturdy those roots and become community again. This did not happen.
By the 1980's, the word Sighthill had become Glasgow slang for deprivation. With unfulfilled promises of a better place to live in, and therefore a better life, the members of these splintered locales fell into tick box categories that failed to suggest any positive changes.
Slipping from the regeneration plans was the fact that Sighthill had been built on top of dumped chemical waste - something that must have been known to contractors when prising up the earth and replacing it with girders. What came before the estate was a chemical works called St. Rollox, which stood there for over 100 years. St. Rollox produced bleaching powder for the textile industry; with this chemical agent came tons of chemical waste. The waste was buried and cemented over, which was deemed the most effective way to deal with it at the time.
The waste rose from its burial in the form of a body of water.
This water, containing not only the dumped chemical waste but other dross from neighbouring manufacturers, became a water body when it was nicknamed the 'stinky ocean' by those who lived nearby. By naming the water in this way, the local community had given the site a point of registry, a marker in order to locate the deprivation that the site had suffered from throughout most of it's life.
Most of the high rises of Sighthill have been demolished, with inhabitants once again displaced in order to make room for the regeneration project currently underway there. As a space, it will always contain an immensity of shifting bodies - of all sizes - human or material.
Glasgow is an incredibly saturated city with regards to it's historical and contemporary legacies of socio-cultural toil. Rich in both identity and matter, it has been stretched, tugged, pulled, shifted and sprawled across further lands in order to garner it's city status.
Forgotten sites still pockmark the geological and social topology of the land here. Before starting this residency, a good friend and fellow artist based in Glasgow, Consuelo Rosa Servan, spoke to me of a place I hadn't heard of within the city limits: Sighthill. Consuelo had been facilitating workshops there as part of a regeneration project set to capture the imaginations of the Sighthill community.
Built as an estate during the high-rise boom of the late sixties, the buildings erected in Sighthill were grouped together, which is what is known as a 'scheme'. Schemes had multiplied in Glasgow during this time, with concrete and steel-work erupting from where established slum housing used to exist. This was the first displacement of human and matter - from crowded 2 room occupancies to pre-fabricated maisonettes with indoor bathrooms. At the time it seemed a miracle to those who went from sharing one room with six other members of their family to having their own bedroom and toilet to boot. However, displaced people need support in order to re-root their lives elsewhere. They need shops, a post office, recreational spaces and continued development funds from the council in order to sturdy those roots and become community again. This did not happen.
By the 1980's, the word Sighthill had become Glasgow slang for deprivation. With unfulfilled promises of a better place to live in, and therefore a better life, the members of these splintered locales fell into tick box categories that failed to suggest any positive changes.
Slipping from the regeneration plans was the fact that Sighthill had been built on top of dumped chemical waste - something that must have been known to contractors when prising up the earth and replacing it with girders. What came before the estate was a chemical works called St. Rollox, which stood there for over 100 years. St. Rollox produced bleaching powder for the textile industry; with this chemical agent came tons of chemical waste. The waste was buried and cemented over, which was deemed the most effective way to deal with it at the time.
The waste rose from its burial in the form of a body of water.
This water, containing not only the dumped chemical waste but other dross from neighbouring manufacturers, became a water body when it was nicknamed the 'stinky ocean' by those who lived nearby. By naming the water in this way, the local community had given the site a point of registry, a marker in order to locate the deprivation that the site had suffered from throughout most of it's life.
Most of the high rises of Sighthill have been demolished, with inhabitants once again displaced in order to make room for the regeneration project currently underway there. As a space, it will always contain an immensity of shifting bodies - of all sizes - human or material.
Please read the interview with Consuelo here
As the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown continues, I would like to further this creative research on the materiality of place, with a focus on the urban ruins of the industrial revolution. As I type, laptop teetering on a make shift desk, I wonder how this piece of meandering time will affect the sprawling city and its human and more-than-human dwellers. Will the edge-lands seep into developed zones, creating else-where/s?
Thank you for reading.
India
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