Our Housing Histories Workshop with Joey Simons and Kaya Fraser

Join us for this creative workshop to examine how the home can act as a record of personal and political change.
About this Event

“Here and there in the devastation stood a bit of broken masonry, a jagged piece of railway arch, a gable with only the sky behind it. What had it belonged to? What street had it been in? Pacing the emptiness between the Cyclopean monoliths, memory was not enough…all points of reference gone…”. Ralph Glaser, Growing Up in the Gorbals, 1986

This workshop at Generator Projects in conjunction with the exhibition will examine how the home can act as a record of personal and political change even in conditions of demolition, redevelopment and war, and the possibility of archival resistance when ‘memory is not enough.’ Drawing on Franki Raffles’s documentary photography of Scottish housing activism in the 1980s, the work of the Glasgow Housing Struggle Archive, experiences of the Perth floods of 1993 and Generator Project’s own archive, we will use text, collage, oral history and found objects to create our timelines of housing change.

Lunch will be provided.

Bios
Joey Simons is an artist and writer from Glasgow. Exhibitions include: The Fearful Part Was The Absence (Satellites, 2021), Beyond the Forbidden Gate (GI2024) and Their Theatre and Ours (Market, 2025), all of which drew on submerged histories of working-class cultural and political organising in the city. He is also a founding member of the Glasgow Housing Struggle Archive.

Kaya Fraser – The Everyday Archivist – is a multidisciplinary artist from Perth.
A former GENERATOR Projects committee member, who curated the Archive25 exhibition (25th Birthday 2021) and Illusive Utopias (2022). In her Satellites exhibition Give Us A Smile (2024) she explored the everyday and working class homes as sites of archive. Each of these exhibitions thinks about the repetitive reimagining and writing of our lives and how the places we live, who we are and politics affect this reimagining

Supported by the University of St Andrews and the St Andrews Centre for Contemporary Art. Refreshments will be available.

Image © Franki Raffles Estate, all rights reserved. Courtesy of University of St Andrews Libraries and Museums and Edinburgh Napier University.