Wastelands & the City: The More-than-Human Life of Contemporary Ruins
Published: 6 February 2024
The University of Glasgow Challenges in Changing Cities Interdisciplinary Research Theme in collaboration with the Glasgow School of Art’s Reading Landscape group.
The more-than-human life of contemporary ruins: politics, ecology, and community
The University of Glasgow Challenges in Changing Cities Interdisciplinary Research Theme in collaboration with the Glasgow School of Art’s Reading Landscape group.
Second seminar in the series Wastelands and the City
Speakers: Simon Murray, Amanda Thomson and Helen Traill
Date: Tuesday, 27 February, 3-6pm.
Clarice Pears Building, University of Glasgow, Room no. 103 B
Still from ‘Boundary Layers’, split screen video, Image: Amanda Thomson, 2023.
Wastelands speak to us as “waiting lands” (to borrow from the German term die Brachen) – but what are they saying to us? What knowledges, skills and practices do we need to engage with them? What kind of futures could wastelands have in the city (of Glasgow and beyond)? Often seen as dormant, useless or derelict land, wastelands are also places of nature and social life. They are sites of risk and play; non-design and regulation; property rights and trespass; contamination and renewal. Wastelands are, then, places of paradox, which lay bare the complex actualities of cities whilst also suggesting alternatives ways of making them. Glasgow – still – has a large number of wasteland sites and these offer us the occasion to explore ongoing practices, histories and futures.
The University of Glasgow & Glasgow School of Art Seminar Series, Wastelands and the City, will bring together ecologists, planners, social scientists, activists, archaeologists, artists and others to think dynamically and openly about the possibilities afforded by such sites as well as to reveal the engagements already taking place in Glasgow and other cities.
In our second seminar in the Wastelands and the City series, entitled The more-than-human life of contemporary ruins: politics, ecology, and community, Simon Murray, Amanda Thomson and Helen Traill reveal how performers, artists, and communities have found ways of responding to apparently ruined and abandoned spaces.
Wastelands and contemporary ruins: a dialogue with performance.
Simon Murray
Simon will reflect on how the ruins of capitalism and warfare have offered and enabled sites for contemporary performance and other cultural events. What is the allure of such sites for performance makers and why make work in these locations? Drawing upon European fieldwork he undertook for his book Performing Ruins (2020) he will consider the various ways in which performance practitioners and other artists have engaged with dereliction and ruination. Simon will particularly offer accounts from Sarajevo, Berlin, Mostar, Gibellina, Legnica, Cardiff and Athens and the conversations he had with actors, directors, writers and other artists in these places.
Simon Murray, very recently retired from Theatre Studies at the University of Glasgow, is now Honorary Senior Research Fellow at this university. He has a deep background in Sociology and Cultural Studies, has been a professional theatre practitioner and was Director of Theatre at Dartington College of Arts before arriving in Glasgow in 2008. He has published widely on physical theatres, modern mime, Jacques Lecoq, lightness, collaboration and WG (Max) Sebald. Performing Ruins (Palgrave Macmillan 2020) was one of the first in a series of monographs entitled Performing Landscapes.
Let’s turn to the mosses
Amanda Thomson
The subject of this presentation will be Boundary Layers, the piece of work produced as part of Scotland’s collateral exhibition for the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023. Boundary Layers explores, in video and commentary, the traces of Ravenscraig steelworks that remain and how, in the 30 years since its closure, new communities of plants, insects, birds and animals have formed. She'll discuss what we can learn and what we might find from paying attention to spaces that are often overlooked, or seen as vacant, marginal and without value, and how we can deal with complex and overlapping stories and histories of place.
Amanda Thomson is a writer and visual artist who lives and works in Strathspey and in Glasgow and lectures at the Glasgow School of Art. She has exhibited nationally and internationally. Boundary Layers was part of A Fragile Correspondence, Scotland’s collateral exhibition for the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023. She is currently part of the group show ‘The Silent Archive’ in RBGE’s Inverleith House. Her essays are in several anthologies, and have been on BBC Radio 3 and 4. Publications include A Scots Dictionary of Nature (Saraband), microbursts (with Elizabeth Reeder) and Belonging, Natural Histories of Place, Identity and Home (Canongate), shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing 2023.
Reimagining urban wastelands as collective escapes
Helen Traill
How can wastelands be reimagined by local actors? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from case studies of community growing sites in Glasgow that were established on formerly derelict sites, this paper traces narratives of community revitalization. It uses these narratives to think about uncomfortable echoes within such stories, and the limits and possibilities inherent in localised projects which are both opening urban spaces for alternative values (particularly emphasising the possibilities of escape and connection within community growing as a practice), and reinscribing patterns of exclusion and difference.
Dr Helen Traill is a sociologist and Lecturer in Political Economy and Sustainability at the Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow. Her work has explored the ideas and practices in community, sustainability transitions and their tensions in relation to care and social class, municipal energy transitions, the social life of value(s) and urban land politics. She is the author of The Practice of Collective Escape: Politics, Justice and Community in Urban Growing Projects (2023, Bristol University Press).
Staklena Banka (Bank), Mostar. Cover image: ‘The Practice of Collective Escape’,
Image: Simon Murray, 2017. Bristol University Press, 2023.
This seminar series is organised by Ross Beveridge (ross.beveridge@glasgow.ac.uk) and Susan Brind (s.brind@gsa.ac.uk) and supported by the University of Glasgow Challenges in Changing Cities Interdisciplinary Research Theme and the Glasgow School of Art Reading Landscape group. Further seminars and events will take place in late Spring and Summer 2024, details to be announced in due course.
First published: 6 February 2024
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