I Woz Ere: An Intimate Look at the Forgotten Tower Blocks of the Edinburgh City Skyline
About
This practice-based PhD explores the making and remaking of place within housing developments, rooted in my lived experience as well as feminist and queer thinking. Centred on Edinburgh tower blocks/housing 'schemes', this research aims to address issues of 'representation' with residents/place, to ask what modes of expanded contemporary art practice need to be developed to sit closer to the here and now of our experiences.
Within the project, I adopt an embodied socio-material approach that consciously engages with the sensory perception and memory of place. A methodology of speaking with(in) that may afford us access to complexities in experiences perhaps lost or altered through 'usual' research methods. Within this context, our senses of place, placemaking, matterings and meanings may be different and relational but also contested to challenge fixed cultural constructions/meanings of the schemes and acknowledge the multi-vocality and always-becoming of place.
My project sits deliberately 'between', deploying an expanded contemporary art practice that assembles writing, image-making, sound, collage, drawing, and installation to notice and hold the divergent, hidden or often overlooked. To do this, I devise corporeal and multi-vocal approaches to art practice/collective activity that actively situate and entangle myself with(in) the schemes/research. Practices of interference that work to disrupt 'traditional' methods of knowledge production and hear voices often silenced in public and academic discourse. I experiment with creative and everyday practices to make and remake images, encounters, and meanings of schemes with residents/place. Embodied mappings with(in) place that might enact multiple overlapping possibilities, temporalities and ways of knowing the Edinburgh tower blocks/housing schemes.
In doing so, my project challenges one-dimensional, stigmatising cultural constructions of place to centre voices often repressed, misrepresented and ignored that may influence all sorts of attitudes, images, perspectives, and even decision-making. A practice that emphasises the connected rather than disconnected to address questions of ‘representation’ and more widely speaks to issues of social advocacy, spatial justice and working-class history-making.