13 Apr Barrowland Ballroom Project Funding

RECOLLECTIVE are delighted to announce that Creative Scotland is funding their year-long project and book on Glasgow’s legendary Barrowland Ballroom.  The project will also be supported by Glasgow Life (Merchant City Festival) and Glasgow City Heritage Trust.

Through photography, creative writing and graphic art and multimedia, the award-winning artists of RECOLLECTIVE will create a unique publication that charts the untold stories of the Barrowland Ballroom. It will do so in a year long project with close collaboration with the venue, the east end community that surrounds it, and a much wider community of gig-goers, dancers and musicians whose life stories are woven into the social – and physical – fabric of the building.

A series of free public events, local workshops and careful documentary research will focus on the Barrowland as a hive of activity dedicated to music, including all the tasks and functions that makes it the best venue in the UK (as voted by a Radio 1 poll of 60 bands) and the second-best small venue in Europe.

The many lives that pass through it – now, then and in the future –will be engaged with, and documented – from veterans of a thousand gigs, to young people going to their very first. We will look at the venue as a social institution – a fixture of Glasgow’s regenerating east end, in many respects, it’s cultural heart. The resulting artworks will be collated into a unique, limited-edition souvenir publication that combines literary non-fiction, graphic art and photography.

RECOLLECTIVE will be hosting exclusive tours of the Ballroom in August 2018 as part of the Merchant City Festival. Details to follow.