Glimmers in Limbo: Art and the Built Environment

Date: Wednesday, 27th August 2008
Time: 12.00-14.00 hrs
Venue: Buchanan House, seminar room K505, 58 Port Dundas Road, Glasgow G4 0HG

Programme
12.00 Registration and buffet lunch
12.30 Welcome
12.35 Presentation
13.35 Questions and answers
14.00 Close

Abstract

Concealed behind a crumbling façade, above a functioning, contemporary amusement arcade, in a building that sits on the cusp of Glasgow’s regenerating Merchant City district and its deprived East End - lie the decaying remains of the Britannia Panopticon, the UK’s oldest surviving music hall. Amid the ruins of this place of popular entertainment, a group of volunteers continue to mount an erratic and eccentric programme of performances, tours and exhibitions. No secured funding for the building’s on-going maintenance or coherent plans for its future exist, despite its official status as ‘of special historic interest’ (Historic Scotland, 2008) and its presence on Scotland’s Buildings at Risk Register.

Read in this context, the Britannia Panopticon building exemplifies ‘in-between-ness’ – between regeneration and decline, between past, present and future, between conservation and decay, between ‘living’ building and static monument, between material culture and cultural memory, between public and private…

The presentation, which includes audio-visual material, describes and comments on a suite of site-responsive interventions made in October 2007, as part of a three-year project funded by the  Arts and Humanities Research Council and hosted by the Mackintosh School of Architecture at Glasgow School of Art. Using sound, projected imagery and performance, the interventions were intended to explore the productive in-between-ness of the site – its potential to resist drives to fix or determine readings and uses of the built environment.

Our active engagement with such unregulated, unresolved, ‘in-between’, spaces and places is, the presentation argues, key to developing and sustaining a dynamic and inclusive urban environment. The presentation suggests that site-responsive practice can play a significant role in continuing to invigorate these sites – which allow us to juxtapose alternative images and interpretations of our pasts and presents, and to imagine out futures.

Speaker: Minty Donald, The Mackintosh School of Architecture

Minty Donald is an artist and researcher. She currently holds an Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellowship in the Creative and Performing Arts at the Glasgow School of Art. Her practice-based research is concerned with exploring the potential of site-responsive art as a means of engaging with, critiquing and shaping, the built environment.
Recent and forthcoming commissions and publications include: the way I see it…, a series of site-specific interventions commissioned by the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow (2004); Home: Stornoway, a performance project directed by Stewart Laing as one of the inaugural productions for the National Theatre of Scotland (2006); glimmers in limbo, site-responsive interventions in the Britannia Panopticon music hall, Glasgow (October 2007) and at Tramway, Glasgow (February – March  2008); ‘Tracing Tramlines: site-responsive interventions at Glasgow’s Tramway’, an article in Performance Research Volume 12 no. 2 (June 2007), ‘Pianola Karaoke and Other Attractions: resisting the homogenisation of cultural memory embedded in material sites’, an essay in the volume Performance, Embodiment and Cultural Memory, eds. R. Mock and C. Counsell, publication due 2009.

Booking

To book a place please book online, or phone CBE on 0141 273 1411, or send a message to cbeinfo@gcal.ac.uk. You can also send a fax on 0141 273 1418.

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Lunchtime Seminar - £40

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• In event of cancellation by CBE, a full refund will be made available.
• In event of delegate cancellation, an administrative fee of £15 will be charged for up to a week before the event - there will be no refund after this point.
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