Presented by Panel and Voices of Experience, Remnants is a free newspaper for Glasgow's Merchant City.

Written and illustrated commissions from Tiffany Boyle, Jade Halbert, Caitlin MacLeod, Rhona Warwick Paterson, Laura Richmond and Louise Welsh and conversations between Fiona Sinclair with Mairi Laverty, Adele Patrick with Akiko Kobayashi, Kirsteen Borland with Heather Claridge and Anne Duff with Cathy Houston, pay attention to how women’s contributions have been rendered in/visible through the formation and use of urban space in Glasgow’s Merchant City and beyond.

Download the newspaper here: https://www.flipsnack.com/panelglasgow/remnants_newspaper.htmlRemnants

Remnants is commissioned by Civic Room and a part of their curated programme 'Of Lovely Tyrants and Invisible Women', featuring four solo exhibitions by artists, Lauren Printy Currie, Ashanti Harris, Thulani Rachia and Marija Nemčenko and a newspaper publication by Panel.

Generously supported by Historic Environment Scotland

An exploration into how we might better live together with a focus towards sharing, agency and autonomy.

Households draws from personal reflections of living and ageing. It is inspired by Raising the Roof’s aspirations to construct an alternative to what is available in the current political landscape of housing, social care, and economics: Home, at Last (Archifringe 2019).

The recent pandemic has focused ever-sharper light on the need for quality housing and open space for all and is re-adjusting our expectations towards more diverse forms of household arrangements. In summer 2020, Voices of Experience (VoE) invited their participants and the Raising the Roof (RtR) team to consider how they/we might ‘live our older lives’. Sketchbooks were sent out for gathering thoughts, images and values which were later shared in audio and zoomed conversations.

The (un)ruly book has been co-produced through further discussions and the specific creative practices of the VoE and RtR teams. It is organised around 5 scenes which aim to (un)learn how a design for a specific place and group might be taken forward:

Contributing and Stewarding (ownership + factoring)

Rooting and Interdependence (access and amenities)

Sharing and Making Space (private and communal areas)

Testing Limits and Taking Chances (health and safety)

Taking Time and Care (maintenance).

The (un)ruly book considers how we might better live together with a focus towards themes of sharing, agency and autonomy in the context of increasing age demographics, rising levels of loneliness and working from home as an already lived reality for many, particularly women and those with caring responsibilities.

We invite everyone to consider how we might collectively re-imagine our households and working lives in a way that embraces equity, not working/retiring or the giving and receiving of care as we adopt alternative value systems and spatial outcomes.

Note: In this book, when we refer to ‘we’, this applies to us personally as contributors and authors. Equally, it is our hope and intention that this will include and inspire others, particularly those seeking alternative opportunities for living.

Many Hands:

Many hands have contributed to the design and development of the (un)ruly book as follow:

Images created by Voices of Experience from their collection, with special thanks to and contributions from Raising the Roof.

The Voices of Experience participants Anne Duff, Joyce Deans and Dorothy Bell, who provided insight, experiences and contributions within sketchbooks and audio recordings 2020-2021.

Sofya Staune of VAJ power who produced the digital animations.

Tao-Anas le Thanh who created the films.

Photograph courtesy of Sequoia Hearne.

The Archifringe team who provided the opportunity, funding and gave their on going support, inspiration and input into the work

An exhibition and event situated within the Lighthouse Design and Architecture Centre in Glasgow from June-August 2019, as part of the Architecture Fringe Core Programme. This modest exhibition focused around a series of artefacts - or mementos - selected by eight participants from the on-going Voices of Experience (VoE) project. Voices of Experience seeks to shine a light on women's work and ongoing influence on the making of architecture and the built environment. It is the beginning of an on-going oral archive and investigation into women’s contributions in Scotland since the mid-20th Century. The wider project constructs a series of recorded, on-site conversations between a highly experienced architect or maker of the built environment, with an architect or other professional at the outset of their career. This exhibition shared insights and reflections from a selection of experienced women who had previously taken part in the Voices of Experience project. They were invited to share mementoes from their working life - and the associated (unheard) stories behind them. The mementos were presented in a series of opened, uniform, archive boxes arranged as simple display cases within the compact, brightly lit exhibition space, or ‘nook’. These sat behind two introductory fabric banners framing entry to the space. The archive boxes were centred around a colourful, hanging mobile constructed from geometric elements found within the Voices of Experience logo. The mementoes ranged from reports, newspaper clippings, drawing tools, souvenirs, and small sections of building material collected along the way. These were accompanied by text – to provide an understanding of context and significance. A series of sound clips from their conversations were played for the duration of the exhibition, providing a public platform for their unheard stories whilst also connecting the women, their artefacts and a selection of their conversational themes. The VoE team hosted an afternoon tea – adjacent to the exhibition – that brought the women together in conversation to discuss their mementoes and provided a forum that encouraged conversation, sharing of perspectives and invited contributions from those attending. An accompanying, introductory essay to the exhibition, written by Dr Elizabeth Darling of Oxford Brookes University (distributed within the exhibition space) stated: ‘Not seeing will no longer be an option…the young woman architect will have no doubt that she stands on the shoulders of many giants, is following a path already trodden, and in which she can make further inroads.’

Saturday 8th September

Glasgow Womens Library

1-3pm

FREE (Please book via GWL as we have limited spaces)

From Glasgow Women’s Library is a new collection of products developed by Panel with Glasgow Women’s Library.  Inspired by the history of the organisation, its library, archive and museum collection, each piece speaks to women’s history and experience.

To celebrate Finch and Fouracre’s sketchbook commission, we have partnered with Panel to discuss How role models and built environment histories might be re-thought through searching, reading and listening to experienced women architects who have been written out of mainstream history? We will do this through a series of small active workshops, over tea and cake, and celebrate Finch and Fouracre’s architecture inspired sketchbook for the Library.

Photographs by Sequoia Hearne

SHE MAKES SHE CHANGES

Showing of 30 minute documentary film, She Draws: She Builds (2016) and panel discussion with the filmmakers and invited ‘makers’- of buildings, movements, books.

Film & Discussion
THU 21 June 2018
5.30pm - 8pm

Glasgow Women’s Library
23 Landressy Street
Glasgow G40 1BP

TICKETS

Documentary film, She Draws: She Builds, is directed by Sarah Akigbogun, with Anna Schabel and Chloe Tayali. This film shows edited interviews with fifteen architects over a period of about three months in 2016. They asked questions about initial decisions to study architecture, their practice as architects today. This project has many synergies with Voices of Experience: Architecture in Conversation, and for this first Scottish showing of the film, we host a panel of guests, including the filmmakers, historian Diane Watters, Architects For Change members Elsie Owusu and Selasi Setufe on broader examples of women ‘creators’ in the historic built environment, to explore how ‘She Makes: She Changes’.

Friday 18th May
The University of Manchester
09:45 – 16:15

The starting point for this conference is the lived experience of women now in their 50s and 60s. With the benefit of access to education and contraception, they have lived their life differently from those of previous generations. Women in this cohort entered the workforce in greater numbers and for some this brought opportunities to work at a higher level taking on influential and professional management and leadership roles. What are the expectations of older women today? Drawing on academic and empirical research in gerontology, sociology and business and the personal experiences of older women working in the cultural sector, this event brings together current work in this multidisciplinary field.

What are the opportunities and barriers that exist for women who wish to continue to contribute to the sector that they spent their working lives in? Are there models of intergenerational work to build on which help ditch the old/young binary? Does creativity develop with age? How are the expectations of the way we live in our 60s and beyond changing? Rather than being a time of shrinking horizons, can the leadership experience and wisdom of older women be harnessed and how can we make the most of the new longevity?

Architecture in Conversation: Voices of Experience

1 March 2018, 5.30-7.30pm

Souvenir launch (Finch & Fouracre’s GWL sketchbook) 

Glasgow Women’s Library, Landressy Street, Glasgow

Making (Hi)stories of women in Scottish Architecture

 You are invited to the next Architecture in Conversation: Voices of Experience event at GWL. The Bridgeton-Women’s Library Sketchbook is launched at this event. “As well as the physical transformation of the building, Finch and Fouracre’s design also represents the idea that women’s history has always been present beneath the surface of commonly perceived histories…”

Investigation Room: We have lots of questions about what this archive might include or point to: How is it discovered, browsed, searched, linked to other relevant sources, and might spark new written or spoken histories? What is the experience of using this archive, encountering material in different forms: books, drawings, photographs, models, databases, audio recordings, conversations and events, blogs? How do you comfortably occupy an archive with different artefacts, technologies and people, and in different types of spaces? Using material gathered as part of the Voices of Experience project, we invite you to participate in short workshops around the Glasgow Women’s library’s spaces to explore these questions. Perhaps some sketchbooks might be filled….

Women Working In and for The Public Sector

To accompany the AA XX 100 Conference, 'Women and Architecture in Context, 1917-2017', the Twentieth Century Society held a two-day tour in London and Cambridge, which joined the AA in celebrating the rich and varied legacy of twentieth and twenty-first century women architects. 

VoE team attended Day 2 which included visiting building by Architects Rosemary Stjernstedt, Pat Tindale, Anne Kay, Zaha Hadid, Magda Borowiecka, Julia Barfield, Kate MacIntosh, Sadie Morgan and Sarah Wigglesworth. 

In progress