Essays

11th September 2021

RECOVER – SARAJEVO 25 Years On by Chris Leslie

Chris Leslie has spent 25 years documenting Sarajevo. He has followed the changes in that city through the post war period and engaged on many levels with the legacy of conflict. His latest work asks how the city stages its recovery and how we can know it as that city in recovery. What shapes our approaches to it now, and what does it tell us?
1st August 2021

RAW & GREEN? :
Barnabas Calder on Architecture and Energy
by Florian Urban

Form follows Fuel -or is it, Form follows Food? -Or both? In advance of COP26 -and our own specially timed 'Climate' issue in November, Florian Urban assesses Barnabas Calder's new book. Its exposé of Architecture - and especially the production of its materials, steel and cement - as the worst of climate-change culprits is interesting, to say the least, in the light of Calder's published panegyrics on Brutalism...
28th July 2021

A SILLY STORY
by James Mooney

No more emojis. I am never going to become one of these writers who use emojis even if I live for a billion years...
24th July 2021

METAPHORIC
by Raymond Burke

Too big to big up any further as a classroom poster or a one man stage show, Raymond Burke has finally compiled and published the book of the Metaphoric Table with The Drouth. -Can you not refuckingmember what Tmesis is? Do you go red red in the face when faced with Epizeuxis, or is it Anthimeria? -then this is the book to figure it out for you ...
17th July 2021

More than one way to wash a heart…
by Sara O’Brien

Is translation a mere figure? - A type of metaphor where new sets of words or phrases are applied to an object or an action? Is it indeed a ritualistic figure in its transporting of meaning to another shore? Sara O'Brien explores translation as the hosting of the other, and the arrival of the guest from beyond to the new shore.
12th July 2021

GRAVITY
by Barbara Melville- Jóhannesson

'Gravity ... the universal force of attraction acting between all matter’ - The entire world is pulling on us. How does it feel to be in a world of chronic illness?
12th July 2021

Internet Frontier: What’s the Story? by Calum Barnes

Writing has proliferated since the advent of social media. Everyone is at it. What is the status of such writing, asks Calum Barnes, how do 'writers' view such writing and what we are doing when we are writing it?
5th July 2021

SUGAR AND SOOT & ALL THINGS MOOT :
Denise Ferreira da Silva & Arjuna Neuman @ CCA
by Johnny Rodger

Can climate change be discussed in isolation from racism? From slavery? Can it be discussed in isolation from anything? Johnny Rodger reviews the art work/film by Ferreira da Silva and Neuman commissioned for the Glasgow International Festival.
2nd June 2021

Mining the Moral Economy:
Ewan Gibbs on Coal and Deindustrialisation
by Johnny Rodger

Ewan Gibbs' book 'Coal Country' claims to be the first full length study of deindustrialisation in the Scottish coalfields. But its scope is actually much broader and much more ambitious in its treatment of an age of massive social upheaval. Johnny Rodger reviews and appreciates that ambition.