Having recently moved institutions, from the semi-rural Moray School of Art, to Glasgow School of Art which is located in a post-industrial city, my everyday sensibilities around place are in the process of being completely rewritten. The excess of the city is stimulating but underneath its upper surface is a place which takes time to understand. The city’s reflective exterior seems impervious to scrutiny, the continual overlay of its historic palimpsest is not easily read, its signifiers can be overlooked in the rush to get from A to B. Not only have I been displaced, so too has the School of Fine Art. Since the tragic fire at the iconic Mackintosh building on Renfrew Street, everything that was housed there has been moved to the Tontine, Trongate in the heart of Glasgow’s old town. The modern Tontine building stands on the site of the earliest hotel in Glasgow, the Tontine Hotel, where the coffee rooms were commonly used as meeting places for the city’s tobacco and textile merchants. Glasgow, known as the second city of the Empire, its northern powerhouse, is a city built in part using the finances from the trade in tobacco, sugar and cotton. Many of the places in Glasgow’s old town bear the names of Empire, such as, Jamaica, Virginia, Glassford. Walking the streets, we walk these inscriptions of empire and, although latterly Glasgow was a proud abolitionist city, much of Glasgow’s early heritage cityscape of the Merchant City was built on the legacy of slavery. I walk the streets haunted by Empire and reflect on the need to reckon with these ghosts of Scotland’s past.

For Relate North 2016, I propose to deliver a paper situating Glasgow’s spectral character within the current theory of spectrality. This paper will be supported by photographic images taken in the northern hauntological cityscape.