Dismantling, Disappearing, Reconstituting? Reflections on the Mackintosh fire 2018

Abstract

In this article, the curator Viviana Checchia and the theatre scholar Anika Marschall reflect on the impact that the fire at the Mackintosh building in 2018 had on their public engagement at the Centre for Contemporary Arts: Glasgow; in particular on the art project The Scottish-European Parliament they co-created. Through an interdisciplinary lens, they consider how this critical and curatorial work relate to the Mackintosh wreckage, a former site of learning and cultural production. Whilst asking the question of 'we', the authors situate the concrete wreckage as nodal point, which produces political ties between cultural communities, claims to rights, space, and infrastructure. By drawing on Lauren Berlant (2016), Shannon Jackson (2011) and Irit Rogoff (2008), they discuss the notion of infrastructure and propose that a critical infrastructure enables them to unlock the capacity for shared imagination and to bring a fragmented community back into urban display in wrecked sites.