25 Albert Drive, Glasgow, G41 2PE
15 February - 2 March 2008

Four interventions - tramway 1, tramway 2, entrance/reception area, throughout the ground floor - in contemporary arts venue, Tramway, invited visitors to interact with the fabric, histories and everyday life of the building, engaging with Tramway’s past, present - and future.

In Tramway’s main performance space, backstage was flipped centre stage, as visitors were invited to consider the ‘private’ and ‘public’ worlds of the theatre. A full-scale photographic image of the reverse of the large brick wall (built for Peter Brook’s inaugural production in Tramway in 1988) was projected onto its on-stage side. It was accompanied by a sound mix, layered from the whispered commands and conversations of theatre technicians working behind the scenes.

Visitors were invited to push trolleys up and down the steel tramlines which remain in the floor of Tramway’s large exhibition space as relics of its industrial past. Each trolley held a video projector, showing journeys across Glasgow filmed in summer 2006 and 2007 while driving along the routes of the city’s nineteenth-century tram network, projected onto the whitewashed brick wall of the gallery. The video played as the trolley moved and froze when it stopped – allowing visitors to edit their own cut of Glasgow’s movie, sound-tracked by the sonorous rumble of the trolleys’ steel wheels.

In the entrance/reception area of Tramway, visitors could witness a free ‘performance’ of highlights from Tramway’s previous seasons - a miniature projection showing time-lapse footage recorded throughout 2006 and 2007.

Visitors were encouraged to navigate Tramway following the lines of a map, based on Glasgow’s tramways between 1893 and 1896, and marked throughout the ground floor of the building. Nineteenth century landmarks rubbed against the contemporary features of the building, as the Victorian city was telescoped within Tramway’s walls.

‘The work at Tramway was incredibly affecting – understated, gentle, subtle and yet hugely successful in alerting the visitor to previous and current uses of the building and its physical form. Overall the interventions animated the whole ground floor, offering access to both public and more private areas, so the work gave permission to explore spaces normally denied access. Given most “open doors” access to buildings normally closed is by guided tour, a success of this work was as a self-guided exploration which made it feel quite privileged, with more personal impact and even at times a little mischievous.’
(Ben Spencer, February 2008)