business as usual: hostile environment (A REMIX) | Sound Works

A new series of sound works by Alberta Whittle and Francis Dosoo and featuring:

Adebusola Ramsay | Cllr Graham Campbell | Anastasia Maria Tariq | Rema Zeka Sherifi |

Maryhill Integration Network’s Joyous Choir

This suite of sound works interweave original musical composition and sound design by Francis Dosoo with conversations rooted in our local area to creatively explore the heritage of the Forth & Clyde Canal in relation to wider histories, stories, and ideas.

These can be listened to wherever you are, but we recommend listening while taking a walk along the Forth & Clyde Canal if you can.

Excavating Beginnings & Move Like Water explores Glasgow’s relationship to, and role within the transatlantic slave trade. Using the rebranding of ‘Merchant City’ as an anchor, Alberta and Adebusola excavate the various ways the city tells on itself—a willingness to celebrate Glasgow's mercantile past but without acknowledging  it’s enduring affect and impact on the present.

How do we interrupt cycles of remembering and forgetting? How do we create new ways through? Excavating Beginnings & Move Like Water draws parallels between navigating waterways and navigating archives to lay bear the stories and histories that lie beneath the surface

Lessons Learned: Weather Warnings reflects on the major redevelopment works affecting North Glasgow in the present day and how these plans echo  previous cycles of gentrification, divestment, and community disempowerment—where austerity and poverty are reframed as ‘opportunity’.

What does it mean to define an area by what ‘used to happen there’—where ‘post-industrial’ is used as a kind of euphemism to mean ‘nothing happens here’, or maybe more accurately, ‘nothing white happens here’ or ‘nothing middle class’ happens here?  Lessons Learned: Weather Warnings charts how the architecture and infrastructure of the city underpins and produces our understandings of austerity, poverty, race, and class.

They Are Our Neighbours is a conversation reflecting on the work of the Maryhill Integration Network as the organisation celebrates it’s 20th Anniversary.

Together, Rema, Anastasia, Alberta, and Kirsty talk through the role of creative expression in building and sustaining communities and solidarity, and the importance of 'joy’ as a tactic to hold space for healing, restoration, and catharticism.

Waters of Life: Udha Vada Ska is a song written and performed by Maryhill Integration Network’s Joyous Choir, remixed and arranged by Francis Dosoo.

Developed through a series of song-writing workshops led by musician and researcher Lucy Cathcart Fröden, the song features lyrics in Albanian, Turkish, Twi, Basque, Swahili, Gujarati and reflects on the choirs’ personal experiences of journey, home, exile, and joy.