here is where we meet
“Archives are not inert historical collections. They always stand in an active, dialogic, relation to the questions which the present puts to the past; and the present always puts its questions differently from one generation to another.”
Constituting an Archive, Stuart Hall
It’s a Saturday at Market Gallery and the energy from the Barras swarms the surrounding area, filling it with a liveliness unusual to find on other days of the week. We always have passers by but on a Saturday, if the shutters are up, the window is alive with character and movement; eyes looking into our space with curiosity or confusion, possibly unaware that we’ve been around for twenty five years. Or that we, the archive, are even here.
We’ve existed for a wee while now, growing in {size, mass, volume} with every person, event, performance, or conversa tion that happens {within, around and through} Market. We used to stay on Duke Street, integrated within the Reidvale Housing Association, but since our eviction – drawn out across 2017-2022 – we came to Ross Street in the Barras. We’re fortunate that spaces and archives are transportable and unfixed, although a lot was lost during the move and memories did drop out of sight. Not that the visible is always a signifier of what has been.
Newly organised and curated, we’re looking quite different now with our labels and order of things. I wonder if what she hoped would be here is here, or if the love of the search is as much the looking as the finding. Twenty five years of Market’s history with many holes, the search doesn’t really lead you anywhere. She seems to enjoy being here though, learning about when we first got internet (it was a big deal!), the quest to uncover St. Mungo’s well, what local kids felt about Dennis toun, their home, and what was available to them in the early 2000s, views on Scotland’s decision to host the common wealth games and how money spent on displays of outdated Scottish nationalism could have gone into supporting local communities, discovering that one of Glasgow’s twin cities is Bethlehem in Palestine, seeing what Market did for the first Glasgow International Festival in 2005, and the never ending question of what an archive actually is.
It’s good to see the kids postcards up on the wall again. Unless someone goes to the effort of digging them out, they just sit here in the dark waiting for their next uncovering. Much like the faces and voices you can see and hear on the screens. What is it like to be a child in Glasgow today, with even less access to youth centres and programmes in the city? Arts spaces were already doing some of the work to fill the gaps formed by the loss of community and youth spaces but how is that sustained if the arts itself is unsupported? Just like the complex feelings about the Scottish govern ment’s use of money during the commonwealth games, State money has a list of priorities and local communities are rarely at the top. Whilst she’s been looking through Market’s history, I wonder what changes she’s recognised between Market’s early years versus now, and whether you can track the slow creep of bureaucracy that comes when spaces are no longer free.
There are some things she won’t find here, which have silently presented themselves in the run up to today’s event. Over its twenty five year lifespan, Market has been offered as an “in kind” space to local groups in need of a safe place for their organising work, away from the eyes of the State. With ano nymity being important under these circumstances, how can this be documented or remembered? And what would be the purpose of preserving evidence of that kind of gathering? Should an archive be concerned with receiving recognition for things done “in kind”, or be lured by ideas of “legacy”? Omissions from the inventory of things, in these particular moments, seems like a necessary pursuit.
There are a mixture of ghosts here today – some visible some not – and ultimately we’ll all fold back into the archive. As we sit here fragmented across each of the boxes, labelled and filed away, we continue our relationship connected by time, memory and evidence. The passing, the collecting, the capturing – seen or unseen, present or absent – here is where we meet.
Written by Emmy Yoneda / Edited by Marguerite Carson
Published as part of 2 shred or not 2 shred: yes, another archive event, 2025.