‘Imagining a City’ is a programme developed by Laura Guy in partnership with the Common Guild as part of the research project ‘Remapping the ‘City of Culture’ through LGBTQ+ Cultural Production', supported by the Carnegie Trust and the Glasgow School of Art.
'Imagining a City’ looks back across two decades of queer and trans cultural activity in Glasgow from 1980 to 2000, a period bookended by the Criminal Justice (Scotland) 1980 Act (which partially decriminalised homosexuality in 1981), and the repeal of Section 28 (2A in Scotland) in 2000, three years before England and Wales. Marking the midway point between these dates is Glasgow’s designation as European Capital of Culture in 1990, a pivotal moment in the city’s history, which instigated a period of confident, culture-driven regeneration, and shaped the character of the city’s civic identity.
Guy’s research reexamines this period of cultural growth through the lens of concurrent queer and trans cultural production. Much of this activity deployed arts and culture to respond directly to the onset of crises surrounding HIV and AIDS, and advocated for the needs and rights of the LGBTQ+ community.
Guy is working with invited collaborators who include artist and researcher Steven Grainger, Senior Lecturer in Art History at Newcastle University Fiona Anderson, curator and writer Taylor Le Melle, and researcher, writer and artist Evelyn Whorrall-Campbell to bring this material into conversation with the present, exploring current cultural infrastructure, self-organising and its impact on contemporary civic identities.
With The Common Guild, ‘Imagining a City’ unfolds initially through a closed discursive session in December 2024 with Fiona Anderson, Taylor Le Melle, Evelyn Whorrall-Campbell, who respond to the idea of queer and trans infrastructure through discussion of their own research and practice alongside invited participants. Through provocations focusing on archives of HIV/AIDS cultural production in the North East of England (Fiona Anderson), practices of building just infrastructure in the arts (Taylor Le Melle) and trans political horizons through returns to the1990s (Evelyn Whorrall-Campbell), the informal group discussion will reflect on how infrastructure limits, is worked into, and is reimagined through queer and trans practice.
A public session, ‘Inventing vocabularies’ with Laura Guy and Steven Grainger, will follow on 27 February 2025. In parallel, Grainger’s site-specific poster project ‘Power from Things Not Declared’ which maps significant locations in Glasgow’s queer cultural history will be situated across the city from 27 February – 27 March.
Finally, a display of ephemera, archival material and selection of publications related to the exhibition Read My Lips: New York AIDS Polemics at Tramway in 1992 traces interventions within Glasgow’s public realm and is presented in The Common Guild library from 27 February – 27 March.