Rhubaba Podcast Episode #6

Poetic Resistance, a conversation with Clara Hancock

Available from Friday 11th December, 2020 via Soundcloud and Spotify.

In episode 6, the Rhubaba committee and artist Clara Hancock consider the role of – and need for – public parks and open green spaces. We discuss the ways poetry has a radical potential to transform our experiences in public parks into collective forms of restorative refuge through language and storytelling. In the podcast we look to the UK’s oldest public park, Glasgow Green, as a key example. The Green is a public commons with histories of being a site of resistance for working people: a space for gathering, self-organising, education and protest. Although space and architecture are not inherently political, the ways in which they are occupied and ordered reinforces oppressive systems of power. This is particularly visible in the built, urban environment but also, as we discuss, in the colonial monuments that occupy many of our public parks that perpetuate selective narratives around powerful individuals who ‘built Scotland’s cities’ depicted in ways that omit the violent reality of the British Empire. Clara considers how poetry could be an alternative monument in public space that creates and remembers histories, thoughts, feelings through a form of subtle resistance.

A transcript of the podcast is available here. With thanks to Collective Text for the transcript.

More information:

Clara Hancock works across digital design, video, sound & poetry and their current research explores radical cartographies, the architecture of power structures and the queering of geographic imagination. Clara is currently doing a research based residency at Rhubaba Gallery and Studios (October 2020 – April 2021)

Image Credit: Clara Hancock, Civic Harmony, Film Still, Work in Progress, 2020.