Sites are encountered daily, by accident, passed through on the way to the station, the studio, the archive, the library, quickly, at leisure. She only visits them occasionally but never fails to notice them in passing. The writing emerges from fragments of notes that intersect with day jobs, familial relations, social interactions, forming a kind of topographical intimacy.1
There is usually a path to follow during these encounters—she is trying to get from A to B as efficiently as possible. It takes effort to trouble the logic of logistics, of productivity, the regulatory force2 imposed by the spaces and forms of a city rooted in capital. But when she pauses for a moment to look closer, a language of striation and stratification starts to form.
Taking note of the stony foliage, of the flutes and volutes of aspirational ancient styles, her path defies straight lines, branches out, doubles back on itself. Her body becomes a moving tree of gestures3 as it tries to make sense of the nostalgia wrapped up in these anachronisms.
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On days like this the city bears down on her. The sky a frosted window that lets through light but obscures the bright blue that throws colonial red and blonde sandstone into relief. On days like this the endless feedback loop of nostalgia4 becomes too much to bear, the lithic city5 weighs heavy.
On days like this she thinks of visits to other places6 where this legacy is just as strong but at least citizens are allowed to pull up the paving stones in front of their home and use that piece of earth as a planting bed. Where hollyhocks and sunflowers grow tall up south facing walls. Not the beach under the cobbles but the soil.
On days like this the root ball brought to the surface of the high street, only five years after it was planted, its trunk long gone, brings her down. The continuum of extraction7 couldn’t be clearer, the meadow of the willows8 replaced with a forest of buddleia that spills over the hoarding of an empty lot.
On days like this it does not matter that she cannot name all the plants that grow at the edges of things, it is more useful to note where grey meets green and a border gives way.
- Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Sense of Place in a Multicentered Society, (New York: The New Press, 1997), p 33
- Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, All incomplete (New York: Minor Compositions, 2021), p 16
- Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘How sweet sometimes to share your opinion’ in A Selection of Rilke’s French Poems, Poetry in Translation, trans. by A.S. Kline (2018) <https://www. poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/German/RilkeFrench.php>
- Nam June Paik, ‘Nostalgia is an Extended Feedback’, 1992
- Minty Donald, ‘Erratic Drift’, text published as part of Fast Geology/Slow Architecture (Erratic Drift Part 3), 2023
- Such as Amsterdam, Rotterdam
- Imani Jacqueline Brown, ‘Ecological Witnessing’in Fieldwork for Future Ecologies: Radical practice for art and art-based research, ed by Bridget Crone, Sam Nightingale and Polly Stanton (Eindhoven: Onomatopee, 2022), pp 21-48 (p 20)
- In Scots, Sauchiehall means ‘The meadow of the willows’