Wearable Ghosts of Buildings

Can there be a ghost of a building, the spirit of it an what has happened inside? Are the circumstances in which a building is created built into it, materially and beyond, and if beyond how do we sense that and what are the effects?

The Burnieshed of Bamff was last inhabited in the 1980s, and has sat abandoned since, accruing the kind of ghostliness that abandoned buildings do.

Last summer work began on restoring the ruin in order to create an artists residency. What was an 18th Century gamekeeper’s cottage, will become a place of work still, but the less tangible, more immediate and social work of creating and offering art, literature and music.

A very different energy bouncing off the walls, you might say. And the walls say…

Restoration works are a ritual unto themselves, nonetheless perhaps a less practical, more emotional ritual is in order? For a week in early June, artists Greg McLaren and George Finlay Ramsay will work with the builders and others to make a performance ritual that communes with the Burnieshed to bring a new energy into the building, drawing out the lives and dreams of its materials, builders, inhabitants, the consequence of becoming a building and the intangible parents of structure - ownership, privilege and means.

However archly anthro it might be to attempt to lever building feels by ritually sensing monumental anguish, it does allow us to ask a useful questions whose answers both poetic and metric might prove enlightening.