The Ruined City (Trailer) - Joey Simons

Supported by the Second Life Awards, Joey Simons will create a psychogeographical film that uses the poetry of Edwin Morgan and the nineteenth-century pedlar poet James Macfarlan (1832-1862) to investigate and critique the latest phase of urban redevelopment in Glasgow.
In his poem ‘The Ruined City’, Macfarlan presented an apocalyptic vision of ‘the dust of perished things / that form the city’s blasted heap.’ A century later, in the Glasgow Sonnets, Morgan undertook his own battle with the complexities of a place caught between life and death. Macfarlan’s vagabond figure, ‘smelling of whisky but lucid, intense’, haunted Morgan’s politics throughout his life, the slum dweller’s challenge to comfortable nationalism: ‘He said What is the use of independence / If you are living on potatoes and black bread?’ (Kossuth).
Joey will work with members of the tenants’ union Living Rent to take the poetry of Macfarlan and Morgan to the streets, performing readings as we wander through a city again being riven by speculative development, demolition and dispersal. Working with the video artist Siri Black and the sound artist Lisa Fabian, these readings will be incorporated into a montage of sounds and images, including Morgan’s original landscape photographs of Glasgow.
Joey Simons is a writer, artist and WEA tutor from Glasgow. His practice examines subaltern aspects of the city’s history and its relationship to political organising today.