VIRTUAL ISTANBUL HERITAGE(S)
Abstract
Alex Hale & Gina Wall are Art/Archaeology collaborators who work in the field of archaeology, creative practice and heritage. For AMPS 2026 we propose a paper which presents their collaborative fieldwork from Garnethill Park, in the city of Glasgow. Garnethill is a multi-cultural community, home to The Glasgow School of Art, and Garnethill Park sits at its very heart. The paper explores the history of the park, including its famous public artworks, understanding these interventions as contributions to a stratigraphy of creative responses to public space. The most recent intervention is a bread oven constructed in part using reclaimed sandstone from Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s famous building for The Glasgow School of Art. This form of art/making, created for and by the community, raises critical issues around ownership and the challenges of heritage designation. We consider landscape as archive and through this paper we will think through the ways in which the decaying artworks are transformed in the becoming archive of the park. We aim to surface the range of their affects as active participants in the urban landscape. We will speak to their potential as catalysts and contributors to the vibrant spaces that urban parks provide. Our practice recognises time, materiality, heritage and archive as interconnected planes, which perpetually define and re-define one another. As the various artistic interventions and installations arrive, endure and fade, we explore how the sensed afterlife of the artworks trace a ruination that is a continual state of becoming.
Gina’s practice research is concerned with entanglements of landscape, time, hauntology and photography. Her practice research develops interdisciplinary understandings of landscape, place, rurality and future heritages. She’s an invited member of many research networks including Land2, the RSE funded International Network for Contemporary Archaeology in Scotland (INCAScot), and RSE & RIA funded Rural Reimagined network. Gina is the GSA Co-ordinator for the Arctic Sustainable Art and Design Thematic Network of the University of the Arctic, and a member of GSA’s Reading Landscape Group.
Dr Alex Hale is a Teaching Fellow at the Universities of Edinburgh and Aberdeen, and a Learning Manager at Historic Environment Scotland. His research-based practices are multi-disciplinary and draw on landscape, archive, artefacts and creative responses. His work focusses on graffiti, photography and contemporary unfolding practices. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, a Member of the Chartered Institute of Archaeologists and a member of the Research Council UK (AHRC) peer-review college.