Glasgow Life Artist in Residence: Tim Morozzo and Alasdair Satchel

I’m delighted to say that Tim Morozzo and I will be working as artists in residence for Glasgow Life with the communities of Dennistoun, Sighthill and Haghill, and other people of Glasgow’s Ward 22 until June 021.

Tim is a brilliant photographer with whom I’ve been very keen to work for a long time. His work is intimate and personal and captures character in a very special way. I’m chuffed to bits to get to finally work with him.

Our residence (partially on line under covid conditions) will see me chatting with people of the area to talk about their lives, their community and the character of their area. Tim will then take photos of the participants in a place relating to their stories.
We’ll then have an exhibition of the work at the end of the project, whether online or in an actual space is yet to be decided.

We’ll also be offering podcast and photography workshops for the people of the area. These will be online to start off with.

Here’s some part of what we put in to our application to give you a bit more flavour of what we’re going to work on:

Podcasts

Alasdair Satchel will record a series of podcasts with the people of Ward 22, which  will be shared online. 

The podcasts participants will be asked about their lives, their connections to their area, their memories of the area as it has faced significant change over the years, and the reality of their lives today, tactfully exploring the ward priorities, such as issues of poverty and debt.  The podcasts will bear witness to lives lived across the cultural richness of the area. 

A second strand within the podcast series would be to explore iconic institutions and buildings within the area, celebrating their role in the life of the city.  One key location would be the Dennistoun Palais investigating how it changed over its lifetime, from dancehall to roller disco and after. 
 
The podcasts will be released online.  The podcast episodes will be available to be shared online, to allow as many people as possible to listen to the stories of the people of the area.  They will be released in two sets over the course of the 6 months, allowing the first set to provoke a response from the listenership, which will inspire the content of the second set of interviews. 

A website will be created which will be the public’s main means of accessing the podcast series.  The website will have pages for each episode, featuring links to the topics that the interviewee talks about and any archive materials they are happy to share from their own lives.  The website will also feature a map of Ward 22, with markers and links drawn on, which will activate sound clips of related content from the podcast episodes. 

A podcast of the exhibition live event will also be recorded with contributions from the community together.  This last podcast will be the end of the project.   

Photography

Tim Morozzo will take a series of photos of each podcast participant.  These photos will be taken in response to the content that each interviewee offers up.  The photos will show them in their own environment and in locations that figure significantly in their stories.  The photos will reflect the reality of the participants’ conversations and the current realities of living in a mid to post covid society. Our discussions on the project to date have identified the sincerity of the work of Oscar Marzaroli and Joseph MacKenzie as a reference point for certain approaches to the work.     

Workshops

Tim and Alasdair will be offering workshops on photography technique and approaches to podcasting at The Pyramid as part of this project.  The aim of these workshops is for the participants to learn and develop skills that they can use beyond the AIR project.  The skills that they will work on are skills that allow them to speak out and to be heard.  One of the core needs that both humans and communities have is that of being heard.  Developing skills that allow the participants to share their experience of life is an incredibly empowering thing to do. We hope that the workshops will have a significant impact and be part of the project’s legacy.  The workshops will take two forms, open workshops for anyone in the community to come along to, and schools workshops for children in the area, including workshops in Gaelic. 

We can’t wait to get stuck into it!
This page will be updated as the project goes on, so if you’re interested in the project do check in again soon for more news.