Take a journey of exploration with the team behind A Fragile Correspondence, a project commissioned by the Scotland + Venice partnership for the upcoming 18th International Architecture Exhibition at La Biennale di Venezia.
Scotland + Venice provides artists and architects based in Scotland with a valuable platform to showcase their work on the international stage at La Biennale di Venezia, and this year an exciting collaboration has risen to the fore.
Taking inspiration from Scottish-Ghanian Biennale curator Lesley Lokko’s The Laboratory of the Future theme, A Fragile Correspondence draws out new perspectives and explores issues distinctly rooted in Scotland but with global relevance and learnings on the cultural, ecological and climate emergency issues that we face.
A creative team consisting of the Architecture Fringe, ism and /other (slash other) has been working with Scottish communities for the upcoming project. From the forests around Loch Ness, the seashore of the Orkney archipelago and the industrialised remnants of the Ravenscraig steelworks, the project goes on a journey through Highlands, Islands and Lowlands, and asks how can a closer relationship between land and language help architecture be more attuned to the environment in which it operates.
With this in mind, we asked some of the individuals behind A Fragile Correspondence to share how their involvement in the project has impacted their own sense of place and their awareness of the land around them in everyday life.
Aoife Bláthnaid Nolan, Editor-in-Chief of -ism magazine
“It’s challenging to fully comprehend the scale of issues surrounding land, nature, and the ecological crisis we’re facing. Even if understood, it’s almost impossible to be constantly aware of that scale in the everyday, which is ironically where it matters most. Yet, the project has given me a sense of this, by deepening my empathy for people and place. This is due to the three locations we’ve visited, which are drenched in potent, globally relevant narratives that tune into layers beyond the human scale.
Since visiting Orkney, Loch Ness, and Ravenscraig, my awareness of what is around me, and how it relates to wider contexts and issues is much more acute. This has been surprisingly non-taxing and unexpectedly liberating, which is probably due to channeling that liberation into A Fragile Correspondence, and feeling some meaning or movement from that. But it’s truly the people we have met in each location that contributed to this impact. Prof. Donna Heddle, director of UHI Institute for Northern Studies in Orkney unveiled to us the perpetual awareness that Orcadians have of their natural environment. Their day-to-day lives are intertwined with forces of nature, due to their exposed island landscape. Despite persistent tidal issues such as coastal erosion and flooding, they have learned to adapt to these through community means; an attitude Orcadians have since pre-history.
Ravenscraig, on the other hand, questioned my understanding of what we define nature as. Once a thriving site of the steel industry, the factory’s remnants are now overgrown with birch, larch, and lichen. Resulting in a new type of landscape, I initially felt uneasy and melancholic in it, with an urge to reject its existence as a ‘natural place’. However, artists Hamshya Rajkumar and McElhinney’s, whom we spent time there with, are creating work that validates, and celebrates Ravenscraig’s history both past and present, by tapping into spatial energy that breaks binary perspectives of urban vs rural, human vs. nature.
Despite its familiar relation to Nessie, Loch Ness is a complex landscape of chaos and balance, contrast, and harmony. All characteristics I now know nature to truly be. The Gaelic language there hosts creatures of myth who have lived in the local burns and hills, bringing mystical and divine lenses on the land for local people. Creative ethnologists Dr.Mairi McFadyen and Raghnaid Sandilands walked us through fields, hills, and forests there, taking us to Abriachan Forest Trust. Here, they’re restoring an old forest to ecological health whilst keeping it open to the public. To do so, they fell commercial trees in balance with re-planting and maintaining native species. Their sustenance is an example of doing what we can to realistically battle the climate emergency in contemporary society, even if it cannot be 100% ecological.
Our collaborators, and their context, have opened my perspectives to land and language, and we are incredibly lucky as curators to be working with them on A Fragile Correspondence. All of their work, alongside artists Dr. Amanda Thomson, Dele Adeyemo, and Aaron McCarthy, will be exhibited in our exhibition. I fondly anticipate how their work, and the exhibition, will impact the public’s perspective and sense of place too.”
www.sm-magazine.com | Instagram: @ism.magazine | Twitter: @_ism_magazine
Carl C.Z. Jonsson, / Other
“We in the curatorial team set out to unearth alternative approaches to the land with this project, and anticipated parallels to be drawn in between them, and outwards to other realities across the globe. As we’ve progressed, I’m struck by how these interrelations have deepened my own understanding of the Scotland that I have considered through various projects, which, having lived in Glasgow for five years, have centred around the city and the role it has played in an imperial history. The river Clyde, acting as the maritime gate to the wider world during the heyday of the slave trade and beyond, is the prime example of how a city, and the economies that uphold it, cannot be understood through geographical limits and isolated examination.
Land, then, should not only be understood in architectural discourse as sites that are or aren’t urban. Rem Koolhaas, who has come to be a wordsmith of new architectural vocabularies with every book he releases, has recently highlighted the growing spatial importance of all places non-urban, but in his labelling, he groups them under the banner “the countryside”, as a familiar antithesis to the city.
In choosing our locations, we aimed to recognise that human activity upon land has focal points in less-populated areas as much as in its major cities; that in revealing the complexity of our relationship to the land, we cannot operate within binaries of city and countryside, urban and landscape. Near the river Clyde we have Ravenscraig, which, during its heyday of steelwork activity, can be considered a place belonging to Glasgow, and indeed the wider country, due to the wealth of its production. Today, the site has lost its economic role, and by extension, that sense of place that connects it to the outer world, but it still challenges the values and limitations we put on places, by harbouring a fragile ecology that has reclaimed the site since the closing of the steelworks.
Looking at our forested site, the famous Loch Ness has become a quintessential embodiment of the presupposed dichotomy of Highland and Lowland, land and city. But in the forests around the loch, industrial processes are hiding in plain sight. Our participants in the project that are local to the area, Dr. Mairi McFadyen and Raghnaid Sandilands, have an intimate understanding of how the land has been owned and shaped, from the Highland Clearances to tree farms growing non-native species. Seemingly untouched areas reveal to be as trimmed and tidied as the contents of a plant bed. When moving underneath different forest canopies, I was keenly aware of the density of the branches overhead, the quality of light, the texture of the ground, experiences at a small scale that stem from human operations at an altogether different scale. It is a case of learning to see the forest for the trees, quite literally at Loch Ness, but in other locations too. Realising and responding to this provides us with a new vocabulary, one replacing the binary language that underestimates the impact of human activity on the land.”
www.slashother.com | Instagram: @slash_other | Twitter: @slash_other
Neil McGuire and Andy Summers, Architecture Fringe
“Issues of land, land ownership and stewardship have been themes that have run through what we explore at the Architecture Fringe since it began in 2016. They continue to be at the forefront of our work as part of this year’s Scotland + Venice commission for La Biennale di Venezia which is entitled ‘A Fragile Correspondence’.
Our work in Ravenscraig alongside key collaborators as part of the project has certainly made me continue to reevaluate how architecture can help enable conversations on the future of land, landscape and our changing climate.
Having A Fragile Correspondence rooted in three different locations, with Loch Ness and Orkney being the other two, has also allowed us to share insights between our project colleagues at ism magazine and /other and helped us think about how we might look at Ravenscraig as an authentic ‘natural environment’ rather than primarily a post-industrial one.
It’s interesting that the Ravenscraig site existed as a steel plant for a relatively short period of time in history yet the plant has had such a strong imprint on the idea of that place, of the culture and what it might become in future years.
The steel plant has been cleared so that the surface level no longer bears any resemblance to how that site was beforehand. One of the things we’re looking at in our project responses is that if you dig down you will begin to see different layers that exist below the surface. Right now, the site is being used as a recreational landscape where people walk their dogs and ride bikes and we’re witnessing quite considerable regrowth of new shoots appearing through the cracks of the old floor plates where the different factory buildings were.
Our understanding of how people connect with the places that they live relies in part on having a concept of their own history. But that doesn’t have to be just through the occasional nostalgic memorial such as the popping up of a statue dedicated to steel workers. It can be through something living and evolving.
We’re really keen to think of Ravenscraig as a multilayered place with flora and fauna, ecological growth, stories of the working community, regeneration and dereliction. All of these things can still have currency. It is important for architecture to support and empower communities to think about the history of place and the land around them in new ways rather than just seeing it as something that is beyond their control.
With the Architecture Fringe and through this project, we look to position architecture as a mode of thinking or a mode of research that can be atuned to the environment and extends beyond our professional lives and into our day-to-day personal experiences. It’s made me continue to think about the alternative approaches to how we use and correspond with the landscape and the future possibilities when we look more closely at our relationship with the land that we inhabit.”
www.architecturefringe.com | IG: @archifringe | Twitter: @archifringe
