RE: Handle with Care

Open letter, projected text, archival artefacts, moving image. Glasgow International Festival & House for an Art Lover, 2021-2022

This work began as a live intervention staged at the Heritage Museum in Bellahouston Park: an open letter, projected as text directly over a vitrine of artefacts from the 1938 Empire Exhibition. The piece questioned how Glasgow International Festival and House for an Art Lover display and steward colonial-era objects, addressing the institutions directly on their institutional racism and oppressive labour conditions, and calling for deeper accountability and engagement with the city's colonial legacies.

The night before deinstallation, a violent thunderstorm struck Glasgow. The museum flooded, and the archival artefacts inside the vitrine were destroyed.

Within Nguni cosmology, water and thunderstorms are understood as generative forces - capable of cleansing and transformation. Read through this lens, the storm becomes a collaborator: an agent of tranformation that sustained the work rather than ended it. We turned the projector back on over the now waterlogged vitrine and filmed the result. The resulting moving image work stands as both documentation of this rupture of time and space and an extension of the original open letter.