Introduction

This critical reflection examines how my speculative curatorial project moved from an uncertain initial idea towards a curatorial proposal focused clearly on the problem of “invisible boundaries” in Edinburgh’s public space. What began as an interest in curatorial forms beyond the white cube gradually developed into a site-responsive, public-facing proposal exploring how movement, accessibility, tourism, and everyday use together shape unequal urban experience.

The reflection traces several key moments that reshaped the project’s method and direction. It first considers how early uncertainty developed into a more consciously curatorial mode of thinking, then shows how feedback and the curatorial pitch helped reorganise the project’s structure. It goes on to discuss how fieldwork and route testing led me to rethink viewing in public space, before using my experiences of collective work, exhibition practice, and peer review at Summerhall to show how they developed a stronger sense of collaboration, critical judgement, and a more concrete understanding of curatorial conditions. The project did not develop through the smooth refinement of a fixed idea. Rather, through a series of revisions, a conceptual interest became a more precise judgement about structure, modes of entry, and public conditions.

From Uncertainty to Curatorial Positioning

In the first fortnight of the course, my approach to curating was not so much defined by a project as defined by a change in looking. At that time, I did not have a particular proposal and I didn’t yet know quite what the purpose of the blog was. I did have a growing awareness that curating today does not only start with a pre-determined exhibition object or theme. Rather, it seemed to be more about form, conditions, organisation, and relations. In the beginning, my work was experimental. I took notes during visits and sought to define what my vital curatorial questions might be. This seemed unfocused. But in retrospect, I needed to go from simply describing the work to thinking about its organisation, its spatial and viewer relationships.

My tutors’ early blog responses furthered this. I realised the nature of the blog is not a journal of weekly impressions but rather a portfolio that should display the process of a project from initial concept to its realisation. Week 2 made this clearer to me, especially with the concept of a curatorial platform as a structure based on a coherent theme and principles. (Bacon 2026a) This was a shift in seeing curating as the arrangement of relationships, form, and experience, rather than just the presentation of a static object.

The Week 3 workshop helped me put the idea into practice. My conversation with a Talbot Rice curator using Ai Weiwei’s project at Tate illustrated the idea that you can respect a project, but that does not necessarily make it curatorially successful. Some projects are politically strong and well-known, but they don’t necessarily work on all scales, budgets, or for all institutions or for all visitors. It was the first time that I thought more as a curator, rather than an audience member. Curating slowly began to become for me a practice of judgement. It is not just to select what is interesting or intriguing, but to consider what might work in certain circumstances. In this way, my thinking about exhibitions early in this process was akin to the change we often see in relation to When Attitudes Become Form: exhibitions are not made exclusively of objects but by process, open system, and spatial conditions. (Desaive 2013) What was important for me in this instance was not only that it was historical but also that it challenged me to reconsider my project. My SICP started to become for me a proposal that invited process, conditions, and judgments, rather than the simple exhibition I had made only at the end of the process. This reframed the project from the indistinct interest of a theme to a curatorial attitude.

Project Development, Feedback, and Methodological Change

The comments that I received on the blog brought me back to clearly state a problem that was not previously clear to me. A project must have both a good theme and a good form. It also must have a form that opens up the public to that theme. Until this point, I had primarily considered whether the project dealt with a topical and discussable theme. This feedback made it clear to me that this was insufficient. A public curatorial project cannot rely solely on a timely topic. It also needs to be informed about whether its structure supports the presentation of the issue or not.

This is where Irene Campolmi’s writing on curatorial ethics came in handy. Her position assisted me in re-framing the issue of revision. She argues curatorial ethics entail adjusting with care to changing circumstances.(Campolmi 2016) I thus started to think about project adjustment as a methodological and ethical decision. My inquiry became about whether the form of the project might allow its concerns to be open to visitors and whether care might be embedded into the ways of entering, attending, and remaining in the museum.

My approach to artist selection also took on a “responsibility” rather than “recognizability” aspect. Initially, I assessed the fit between an artist and a project in terms of celebrity or public debate, as they both seemed to raise public awareness. As the project became linked to feasibility, I learned that rather than having an artist who was “celebrity enough”, it was more important for their work to suit the project’s spatial constraints, curatorial form, and ethical considerations. Schuppert’s work on the relationship between the artist and curator further clarified this. Who, how, and where artists get paid is an ethical issue. There are also ethical questions as well. (Schuppert 2021) I, therefore, began to think about the appraisals of artists in curatorial terms of responsibility, resources, conditions, and care, not popularity. This also impacted my concept of co-creation. If existing works do not directly map onto the project structure, co-creation can occur in the form of re-arranging relations between artists, works, and project structure.

Refining the Project Through Constraint

The curatorial pitch was an important milestone to understand the difference between “many interesting elements” and “curatorial framework”. My proposal already included public transport, multiple locations, routes, and a variety of public spatial experiences. However, this was not a strong enough structure to support my proposal. The pitch called for them to be clarified for other people; in this, I found a weakness in my own reasoning. I had fallen in love with a number of formal elements because of their novelty.

This was best illustrated by my initial insistence that the project had to be based solely on public transport. While giving the project a clear emphasis, this structure proved to be unnecessarily narrow (as later discussion showed) because public transport was only one of the possible elements of the project, rather than a constraining structure forcing all other decisions. The project needed to remain true to diversity in site, route, and vantage.

So, constraint was not always limiting. It was productive. The pitch showed it was not a matter of cutting ambition, but of filtering ambition in terms of reason and fit. According to Schuppert, curators must be taught to say no to aspects of ambition that are disguised as responsibility. (Schuppert 2021) This translated into a methodological innovation. Curatorial judgement demands a discrimination between what is productive for a project and what is merely complex. I saw the need for flexibility as enabling coherence.

Fieldwork, Public Space, and Non-Linear Spectatorship

When I walked the entire route proposed in Week 9, I began to understand the difference between the proposal as “structure” and the project as “experience”. The route was coherent on paper. But in reality, the limitations of time and fatigue, accessibility, and a viewing practice difficult to control all came into play. This testing proved two things: the route was too long, and I still had a fairly homogenous idea of the viewer. Terry Smith talks of contemporaneity as multiplicity and disjunctive temporalities, as unevenness. (Smith 2006) It wasn’t until I field-tested the route that this made sense of my observations. If publics experience public space as already uneven, then a project presented in public space cannot approach its audience as equally experiencing the project. As such, the tests meant that I needed to ask myself: can the structure of the project accommodate different public “ecologies” in the city? This is also in line with the Week 10 appreciation of the public as multi-faceted and differentiated, for a variety of temporal, practical, and social needs. (Bacon 2026b)

For this reason, I didn’t consider that the main success is “doing the entire route. Instead, I cared more about more than one point of entry, different possibilities for participation, and more diverse spatial distributions of attention. Ultimately, coming to terms with the possibility of knowing only part of the project made it easier to think about the project. Christine van Assche’s model of “sequential progression” versus “spatial narrative” helped me to think through this change. (van Assche 2003)Though my project isn’t a moving image installation, her language helped me to think about route design in more than just a point A to point B sense. More importantly, I have come to understand that entering public space is a methodological and ethical stance. Patterns of use, time constraints, accessibility, and uneven access of the public to a project are all factors to be reckoned with.

Collective Practice, Summerhall, and Curatorial Ethics

Summerhall has altered my view of curatorial practices because it has made manifest that curating is more than a process of conceptual organisation. They require an infrastructure. Scheduling, resource allocation, curatorial assistance, marketing, and artist fees and commissioning methods have a bearing on what projects you can achieve, continue, and present. Artists’ development, non-commercial support, and accessibility for the public can also be embedded into support structures. This led me to critically reflect on my own SICP. The success of a curatorial project cannot be assessed solely according to the power of its idea, but also its support structure should have integrity with its ethical and public standing.

Summerhall also disambiguated the notion of accessibility and care. Public engagement is a certain type of curatorial choice. There, free admission, hanging works at around wheelchair height, multisensory support, plugging into sound-reduction headphones, and using fonts that are good for people with dyslexia are core practices. These bits and pieces allowed me to see that the audience is not a neutral entity but a group made up of people with varying physical conditions, sensory abilities and pathways for engaging. Krasny and Perry’s gestures to “care about” and “care for” helped narrow this down. Care is only real when it is embodied as conditions that enable a viewer to enter, endure, and make sense of a project. (Krasny and Perry 2023)This impacted my own proposal in terms of consideration for its legibility.

Our collective Our Shell exhibition was important because concepts were taken from the site to fruition. It taught me that inaction is action. My main contribution to the collective was rational organisation. I am good at obtaining disparate ideas, integrating them, and connecting them into a theme that can be more readily discussed. When others were uncertain whether the works needed to be abandoned, or even the whole thing turned upside down, because of the difference between the media and forms, I suggested this difference could be resolved by using the idea of narrative. Rather than imposing formal sameness, the narrative space could be created for the relationship of works through subheadings, grouping, and structure. I also suggested outsourcing the labels of leftover materials and thick letter paper to cut costs, but also allow the exhibition’s style to be represented. Similarly, problems with transportation, projection, and promotion made me aware that the curator’s responsibility is to arrange not only themes or artwork but also the arrangement for viewers to comprehend relationships between works and the pace of the exhibition.

This responsibility was reinforced by peer review, in which I critically read the project of a peer. My main focus was on whether the viewer could experience the project’s concept through the exhibition structure. This taught me to think and pay attention to the pace in the exhibition, the way the work is hung, the entry conditions of the exhibition, and the encounter between curatorial structure and public. It also enabled me to evaluate my project. Among other insights, peer review revealed to me that curating is collaborative, not just as a division of labor. It is also a method for collectively developing judgment by comparing and editing. Peer review, much like the collective curatorial work at Summerhall, demonstrated that the role of curators is not just about creating ideas for public exhibitions but making them work and relevant to the public.

Conclusion

Reflecting on the project, the most important aspect for me was that curating got less abstract. I am no longer thinking about the organisation of ideas. I think even more so of the organisation of conditions. I hadn’t previously thought enough about how to enter a project, understand it, and enable it in practice. And that’s an initial focus. Feedback, fieldwork, group work, and peer review pushed me into doing that. They shifted my attention from just the theme to consideration of the structure, access, rhythm, and responsibility. The project wouldn’t have developed without the organic improvement of a single idea. It evolved through the process of continual revision, which helped to clarify the method.

The virtue here is the capacity to shift its structure to fit conditions. It was apparent from early on in the research that structural flaws exist, and to this end, I learned just how to better design a route, activate viewer entry, and play with public space in the context of the whole. That being said, the project also has its limits. I still rely partly on ‘serendipitous’ artist research, and my thinking about budget, technical strategies, and dissemination only really started to come into focus in the second half of the process. That’s vital, because it reveals what the project is still lacking, as well as what it is doing well.

Ultimately, though, the project has helped me know what I want to do next. I am still most interested in research-based, site-specific, public-sector curatorial practice, and particularly that which joins conceptual research to the material practices of accessibility, display, and viewing. Acord’s definition of curating as practical work seems on point with what I’ve learned: the creation of meaning is in the idea, but also the judgment of moment-to-moment practical situations and material arrangements of the work. (Acord 2010)This project has also allowed me to be much more aware of one thing: public curating requires a great deal of attention to how different publics might respond to a project, and an openness to continue revising that judgment.

References

Acord, Sophia Krzys. 2010. “Beyond the Head: The Practical Work of Curating Contemporary Art.” Qualitative Sociology 33 (4): 447–67. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-010-9164-y.

Bacon, Julie Louise. 2026a. Week 2 Platforms & Organisations. Lecture slides, MA Contemporary Art Theory: Curating, University of Edinburgh.

Bacon, Julie Louise. 2026b. Week 10 Publics and Public Programmes. Lecture slides, MA Contemporary Art Theory: Curating, University of Edinburgh.

Campolmi, Irene. 2016. “Institutional Engagement and the Growing Role of Ethics in Contemporary Curatorial Practice.” Museum International 68 (3–4): 68–83. https://doi.org/10.1111/muse.12137.

Desaive, Pierre-Yves. 2013. “When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013.” Flash Art (International).

Kester, Grant H. 2014. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Krasny, Elke, and Lara Perry. 2023. “Introduction.” In Curating with Care, edited by Lara Perry and Elke Krasny, 1–12. Abingdon: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003204923-1.

Kwon, Miwon. 2002. One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Leighton, Tanya, and Pavel Büchler, eds. 2003. Saving the Image: Art after Film. Glasgow: Centre for Contemporary Arts.

Schuppert, Mirjami. 2021. “Learning to Say No, the Ethics of Artist-Curator Relationships.” Philosophies 6 (1): 16. https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies6010016.

Smith, Terry. 2006. “Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity.” Critical Inquiry 32 (4): 681–707. https://doi.org/10.1086/508087.

Steedman, Marijke, ed. 2012. Gallery as Community: Art, Education, Politics. London: Whitechapel Gallery.

van Assche, Christine. 2003. “The State of Things.” In Saving the Image: Art after Film, edited by Tanya Leighton and Pavel Büchler, 94. Glasgow: Centre for Contemporary Arts.

Whose Space?

Invisible Boundaries in Edinburgh’s Public Life

Project Overview

Sites: Waverley Bridge, Princes Street, Royal Mile, Holyrood Park, Leith Walk, and Ocean Terminal, Edinburgh

Project Dates: 10 July 2026 – 12 July 2026

Opening Hours: 10:00am–4:00pm daily

Duration: 3 days

Curator: Hazel Ren

Lead Image

Curatorial Text

Whose Space? Invisible Boundaries in Edinburgh’s Public Life is a three-day public curatorial project distributed across six sites in Edinburgh: Waverley Bridge, Princes Street, Royal Mile, Holyrood Park, Leith Walk, and Ocean Terminal. The project begins with a direct question: in a city that appears open to everyone, who is actually able to stay, who can only pass through, whose presence is naturally accepted, and who remains at the margins?

This project examines public space as a structure that organises speed, duration of stay, visibility, and modes of movement. It therefore does not treat public space as a setting, but as a mechanism that actively structures experience. Commercial streets, transport nodes, heritage tourist areas, parks, and redevelopment zones all fall within the scope of “public life”, yet they offer different modes of entry to different groups. These differences are rarely stated directly. More often, they are embedded within everyday routes, consumer logic, and patterns of spatial use.

Through three site-responsive artistic interventions, one slow-walk performance, two public classification and feedback devices, and a light AR and QR-code interpretive layer, the project turns everyday movement into a way of reading the city. It does not treat “residents” and “tourists” as fixed categories. Instead, it focuses on how these positions are continually produced through route, rhythm, density, the tourist economy, public transport, and habitual uses of space. AR remains in a supporting role here, only enabling layered reading and route recognition at selected sites.

The project adopts a multi-route structure. Viewers may choose the full route, the city-centre route, the Bus 35-linked route, or begin from any single site. In the high-density central areas, movement is on foot, while the more dispersed sites are served by Bus 35 during off-peak hours. Public transport, therefore, becomes a direct expression of changing urban rhythms.

What this project is concerned with is not the number of attractions, but how different spaces are allocated, used, and experienced. It invites viewers to reread Edinburgh. The city is not made up only of a small number of repeatedly viewed landmarks, but of a public network shaped by different speeds, densities, and conditions of entry.

Artists / Participants

Toby Paterson

Toby Paterson is an artist born in Glasgow and long based there, and a graduate of the Glasgow School of Art. His practice has consistently focused on architectural surfaces, urban visual language, and the ways in which modernist space is viewed and remembered. His work often reconfigures perceptions of urban facades and public structures through painting, relief, and installation. In this project, Paterson responds to Princes Street. The collaboration takes the form of site-responsive co-development, focusing on removable floor graphics, directional prompts, and pause markers. The key issue at Princes Street lies in its commercial frontage, high visibility, and heavy pedestrian flow, and so it requires a visual method capable of dealing directly with urban surfaces and pedestrian order. Paterson’s participation will help the project present more clearly the logic of consumption and the structure of viewing within public space in the city centre.

Clara Ursitti

Clara Ursitti is a Canadian-born artist who has long lived and worked in Glasgow. Since the 1990s, she has worked with smell, installation, and intervention-based practice, focusing on the influence of scent on social, psychological, and spatial experience. Her work pays close attention to non-visual perception and often organises bodily experience through a specific site. In this project, Ursitti’s response to Holyrood Park takes the form of low-intensity, site-responsive development, using scent, short textual prompts, and light interventions. Holyrood Park is given the function of rhythmic transition within the project, allowing viewers to move out of the high-pressure flows of the city centre into a slower and more open spatial condition. The value of Ursitti’s method here lies not only in the use of scent as a medium but in the fact that her practice is itself rooted in situation and context, and can therefore genuinely reinforce perceptual slowing-down, allowing bodily experience to become part of the reading of urban structure.

Chris Johanson

Chris Johanson is an artist born in San Jose and now living and working in Los Angeles and Portland. He is often associated with street culture, DIY ethos, painting, text, sculpture, and installation. His work has long engaged with social relations, the environment, and value judgements within everyday life. In this project, Johanson responds to Leith Walk. The collaboration takes the form of text-based, light public intervention developed through co-creation, focusing on the organisation of language, image, and graphic elements. Leith Walk represents a form of urban space shaped by everyday circulation and ongoing movement. What is needed here is not a strong spectacle, but a mode of intervention that makes “passing through”, “staying, “watching, and “ignoring” more legible. Johanson’s participation will help the project establish a clearer reading structure within the rhythms of everyday urban life.

Slow-walk Performer

The slow-walk performance on the Royal Mile will be carried out by one external performer. This role is the project’s only repeated bodily intervention, taking place three times a day as a low-intensity, non-amplified, non-gathering slow-walk performance. The performer will move at a very slow pace along a short, defined route, without blocking the main thoroughfare or generating a large crowd. The collaboration takes the form of performance execution, with emphasis on speed control, route discipline, and site rhythm rather than characterisation. The Royal Mile is the most tourist-dense and strongly directed site within the whole project, making it the most suitable place to turn “slowness”, “waiting”, and an “out-of-time rhythm” into immediate lived experience through bodily speed difference. This role pushes the project’s thinking about speed, duration of stay, and conditions of viewing from text and route structure into a directly perceivable action.

Spaces and Locations

This project unfolds across six different sites in Edinburgh, each corresponding to a different kind of public-space boundary: entry boundary, commercial visibility boundary, heritage tourism boundary, urban/nature boundary, everyday circulation boundary, and redevelopment boundary. Each site performs a different function, and together they form the spatial structure of the project.

1. Waverley Bridge

Boundary type: Entry and Transportation Boundary
Spatial role: Project entry / first public data point

Waverley Bridge is the starting point of the project and functions as both an entry threshold and a transport threshold. Located at the intersection of the city centre, tourist flows, and public transport, it is the most suitable site for addressing the question of how people enter the project.

Elements: project information board, six-site map, QR-code entry point, identity classification button device.

2. Princes Street

Boundary type: Commercial Visibility Boundary
Spatial role: High-density commercial site

Princes Street represents a form of central public space organised through commercial frontage, display logic, and heavy pedestrian flow. It is where the relationship between consumption, passing through, and visibility is most concentrated.

Elements: removable floor graphics, boundary lines, pause prompts, and directional markers.

3. Royal Mile

Boundary type: Heritage Tourism Boundary
Spatial role: High-density heritage tourism site/performance intervention site

Royal Mile addresses the historical landscape that is continuously consumed within the tourist city. Through the slow-walk performance, it creates a bodily difference in speed, allowing “slowness, “waiting, and an “out-of-time rhythm” to be experienced directly.

Elements: three daily low-intensity, non-amplified, non-gathering slow-walk performances.

4. Holyrood Park

Boundary type: Urban / Nature Boundary
Spatial role: Rhythmic transition point

Holyrood Park allows viewers to move from the high-pressure flows of the city centre into a slower and more open spatial condition. Within the project, it functions as a point of rhythmic slowing down and perceptual transition.

Elements: low-intensity sensory intervention, short textual prompts, AR-supported interpretation.

5. Leith Walk

Boundary type: Everyday Circulation Boundary
Spatial role: Comparative site of everyday urban circulation

Leith Walk represents a form of urban space shaped not by tourist spectacle, but by everyday movement and circulation. In contrast to the city centre, it highlights the relationship between circulation, duration of stay, and being overlooked.

Elements: text-based public intervention / light graphic installation.

6. Ocean Terminal

Boundary type: Redevelopment Boundary
Spatial role: Project endpoint / second public data point/feedback site

Ocean Terminal is the final site of the project and the point at which viewers are invited to reassess the whole route. It also represents the spatial logic of redevelopment, waterfront retail, and lower-density movement outside the city centre.

Elements: button feedback device, QR-code questionnaire, project end-point information board.

Route Options

The project adopts a non-linear route structure. Viewers may choose different modes of entry according to time, stamina, and interest. The three route options and the fragmented-entry model all begin from the same core principle: to re-experience Edinburgh’s public space as something allocated, used, and viewed through the connection of different types of boundaries.

1. Full Route

Route: Waverley Bridge → Princes Street → Royal Mile → Holyrood Park → Leith Walk → Ocean Terminal
Mode of movement: walking + Bus 35
Suggested duration: approximately 4.5–5.5 hours

The full route presents the project’s most complete comparative structure. Viewers begin from the city-centre entry and transport threshold, move through the commercial visibility boundary and the heritage tourism boundary, then reach the urban/nature boundary and the everyday circulation boundary, before finally arriving at the redevelopment boundary and the project end-point feedback site. In this way, they experience in sequence how different spaces organise speed, duration of stay, and modes of entry.

2. City-Centre Route

Route: Waverley Bridge → Princes Street → Royal Mile
Mode of movement: walking
Suggested duration: approximately 60–90 minutes

This route concentrates on the project’s strongest high-density spatial conditions. Within a shorter timeframe, viewers experience the relationship between entry boundary, commercial visibility boundary, and heritage tourism boundary, and observe how public space in the city centre is consumed, organised, and accelerated.

3. Bus 35 Linked Route

Route: Royal Mile → Holyrood Park → Leith Walk → Ocean Terminal
Mode of movement: walking + Bus 35
Suggested duration: approximately 90–120 minutes

This route begins from a high-density heritage tourism site and uses Bus 35 during off-peak hours to connect the more dispersed sites, moving in turn through the urban/nature boundary, the everyday circulation boundary, and the redevelopment boundary. Public transport here is not only a means of connection, but also part of how viewers perceive changing urban rhythm.

4. Fragmented Entry

Mode of entry: entry from any single site
Mode of movement: self-directed combination through map, QR-code system, and on-site guidance
Suggested duration: 30 minutes–2 hours

The project does not assume that all viewers enter public space in the same order, at the same pace, or with the same degree of attention. It therefore treats differences in entry conditions as an inseparable part of public-space experience itself. Viewers may begin from any site, and determine the duration of their stay and their onward route according to their own time, mobility, and interests. In this way, the project responds to the uneven ways in which urban space is actually used, crossed, and perceived.

Public Programme

All parts of the public programme are designed as self-guided participation. Viewers may therefore choose their own point of entry, route sequence, and duration of stay during the daily opening hours of 10:00–16:00, using the project map, QR-code system, light AR interpretive layer, and on-site guidance. On-site staff is responsible only for supervising artworks and public devices, maintaining basic order, and carrying out safety observation where necessary. They do not provide guided interpretation.

1. Waverley Bridge Entry and Public Classification Device

Time: daily, 10:00–16:00
Format: project information board, six-site map, QR-code entry point, identity classification buttons

Waverley Bridge is the entry point of the project. It provides access to the project introduction, route map, and guide page. Viewers may also use the button device to select an identity category that feels closest to their own, or define one themselves. This device functions both as an entry explanation and as a first layer of public data collection.

2. Royal Mile Slow-walk Performance

Time: daily at 11:30, 13:30, and 15:30
Duration: 30 minutes per performance
Performer: 1 external performer
Format: low-intensity, non-amplified, non-gathering slow-walk intervention

The slow-walk performance at Royal Mile is the project’s only repeated bodily intervention. The performer will move very slowly along a short, defined route without blocking the main passage or generating a large crowd. The three daily performances make it possible for viewers entering the project at different times to encounter this intervention. Through a minimal difference in speed, it turns “slowness”, “waiting”, and an “out-of-time bodily rhythm” into an immediate site experience.

3. AR / QR Interpretive Layer

Time: daily, 10:00–16:00
Format: light digital interpretive layer

The AR and QR-code system provides layered reading, route recognition, and short interpretive information at selected sites. Its function is to support self-directed entry and comparative viewing. It does not operate as an independent display, nor does it replace the direct spatial experience of the site.

4. Ocean Terminal End-Point Feedback and Project Archive Device

Time: daily, 10:00–16:00
Format: button feedback + QR-code questionnaire

Ocean Terminal is the project’s endpoint and also the site at which a second layer of public data is generated. Viewers may select options such as “the site where I most wanted to stay”, “the site where I least wanted to stay”, “the site that felt most like viewing”, or “the site that felt most like passing through”, and may also submit short written feedback through a QR-code form. This device records viewers’ judgements on different spatial rhythms, modes of entry, and conditions of movement, forming a basic public archive for the project.

Curatorial Rationale

The central concern of this project is how inequality in Edinburgh’s public space is concretely experienced through speed, transport pressure, the tourist economy, commercial frontage, and transport nodes. The project understands public space as a structure that allocates modes of entry, durations of stay, and visibility. The task of curating here is to make these existing but often overlooked spatial orders legible again.

The project’s method is built on prior route testing, site judgement, and research into public-space management: co-created, site-responsive, low-intensity, graded interventions. According to the current guidance of the City of Edinburgh Council on public activity, interventions in public space are treated differently depending on scale, impact on circulation, and pressure placed on site management. The project, therefore, adopts a graded approach according to site conditions. Sites with lower management pressure use lighter, temporary interventions that sit close to the edges of everyday use; high-density, highly visible, and more tightly managed sites use walk-through entry and removable interventions, with time reserved for formal applications where necessary. The form and intensity of intervention must remain aligned with on-site conditions.

Opening hours are set at 10:00–16:00. This is a curatorial judgement made in order to avoid peak commuting hours and minimise the project’s actual load on city-centre circulation and the public transport system. The city centre is experienced primarily on foot, while Bus 35 takes on the linking function between the six sites during off-peak hours. Public transport itself becomes a medium through which viewers perceive shifting urban rhythm. The AR interpretive layer remains in a supporting role, providing layered reading and route recognition only at selected sites.

The project adopts a non-linear, self-guided participation structure. The full route, the city-centre route, and the dispersed Bus 35 route together create the project’s comparative mechanism. All routes are designed according to accessibility principles, allowing viewers to enter the project according to their own time, stamina, and mobility conditions of mobility. Waverley Bridge and Ocean Terminal also function as entry and exit data points. Button-based statistics, questionnaire feedback, and on-site documentation will form a basic public archive to support future iterations.

Artist Development

The artistic interventions in this project take the form of co-created, site-responsive development, rather than full, high-cost commissions. The three participating artists may work with the curator to adjust scale, medium, and mode of public presentation according to specific site conditions, allowing the works to respond directly to real issues of speed, duration of stay, visibility, and everyday use in Edinburgh’s public space.

The development process is divided into five stages: initial site visits, route testing, site evaluation, adjustment of intervention intensity, and negotiation of installation method. The works themselves are developed gradually during the project in relation to each site’s spatial conditions, management pressure, and modes of public entry. This both helps control production and delivery costs, and ensures that the generation of the works remains aligned with the project’s method. For the curatorial side, artist development also functions as a mechanism of revision: through collaboration with the artists, questions of site fit, medium choice, and implementation are made more specific, increasing the project’s practical feasibility and responsiveness to the site.

Publication

The project proposes to produce a small English-language publication as an interpretive booklet. It will include the curatorial text, a map of the six sites, artist introductions, route guidance, QR-code entry points, and a short explanation of public feedback. It is intended both as an on-site guide and as a way for viewers to revisit the comparison between spaces after leaving the project. In this sense, it provides this distributed, temporary public project with a further point of entry for rereading.

The publication is both a tool of communication and a light archive. Because the project takes place in public space, many of its key experiences are brief, dispersed, and heavily shaped by environmental conditions. It therefore requires a medium capable of retaining the project’s structure. The publication, the QR-code system, and the later organisation of public feedback are designed to work together, so that after the project ends, there remains a coherent record that can be circulated and revisited. For this project, it functions both as a guide and as an extension of the archive.

Basic Budget

References

Artists Union Scotland. “Recommended Rates of Pay (RRoP) 2026–2027.” Accessed April 22, 2026. https://www.artistsunion.scot/recommended-rates-pay-rrop-2026-2027.

Baraitser, Lisa. Enduring Time. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.

Bissell, David. “Animating Suspension: Waiting for Mobilities.” Mobilities 2, no. 2 (2007): 277–98. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450100701381581.

Brauner, Maren, and Irene Grillo. “Walking as a Form of Critical Curating.” OnCurating 8 (2011). https://www.on-curating.org/issue-8-reader/walking-as-a-form-of-critical-curating-1132.html.

City of Edinburgh Council. “Event Planning for Public Spaces.” Accessed April 22, 2026. https://www.edinburgh.gov.uk/downloads/download/16258/event-planning-for-public-spaces.

City of Edinburgh Council. Local Events Open Fund Overview 2026/27. Accessed April 22, 2026. https://consultationhub.edinburgh.gov.uk/sfc/local-events-open-fund-2026-27/supporting_documents/local-events-open-fund-overviewpdf.

City of Edinburgh Council. Public Spaces Fees and Charges 2026/27. Accessed April 22, 2026. https://www.edinburgh.gov.uk/downloads/file/39419/public-spaces-fees-and-charges-2026-2027.

Johanson, Chris. “Chris Johanson.” Mitchell-Innes & Nash. Accessed April 22, 2026. https://www.miandn.com/artists/chris-johanson.

Lothian Buses. Service 35 Timetable. 2025. https://www.lothianbuses.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/35_25C04v06.pdf.

National Galleries of Scotland. “Toby Paterson.” Accessed April 22, 2026. https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/artists/toby-paterson.

O’Neill, Paul. The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.

University of Edinburgh. SICP Toolkit. Course document, 2026.

University of Edinburgh. Week 10: Publics & Public Programmes. Lecture slides, 2026.

Ursitti, Clara. “Clara Ursitti.” Glasgow Sculpture Studios. Accessed April 22, 2026. https://www.glasgowsculpturestudios.org/clara-ursitti.

Below is the English translation of your peer review text. I have kept the content unchanged and only rendered it in clear, natural academic English with consistent terminology.

The most obvious strength of the blog is that the project does not move forward mechanically along a fixed path, but instead adjusts its methods actively as it develops. From Week 6 onwards in particular, the author begins to examine pacing, duration, suspension, display, and viewer experience in a more systematic way, and also starts to understand the exhibition as a structure that generates meaning through space, sequence, and viewing conditions. In addition, the actual influence of collective work on the individual project can be clearly traced: the spatial experiment at Summerhall, the practical experience of Our Shell, and observations of moving image display all feed directly back into the SICP, and in turn lead to revisions in structure and display.

One issue that still needs to be clarified across the SICP as a whole is how waiting can actually be experienced by viewers within the exhibition. In Week 4 and the Curatorial Pitch, waiting is divided into three levels: everyday, social/institutional, and existential. This structure helps the project establish a clear conceptual framework. By Week 6, however, the author realises that the layered structure works more as a mode of explanation than as the exhibition process itself. This is where the methodological shift in Week 6 could be developed further. Movement, pause, delay, spacing, and route all need to be written as mechanisms that generate waiting, rather than as supporting forms. In that way, the later Week 7 decisions about work sequence, title, moving image, site, and access could all be brought together around one central question: how does the exhibition bring viewers into a state of time that is prolonged, organised, and endured? Lisa Baraitser’s Enduring Time discusses waiting as a temporal state that is endured, stretched out, and unable to end quickly. This perspective would support the author’s decision to place waiting within pacing and duration. David Bissell’s “Animating Suspension: Waiting for Mobilities” would also be useful for helping the author address the bodily dimension of the exhibition. His account of suspension describes a state organised through pause, rhythmic change, enforced delay, and uncertainty. Bringing this text into the structural adjustments after Week 6 would give stronger grounding to the treatment of route, pause, and bodily experience.

The second issue appears in Week 7. By this point, the relationship between the works and the path has begun to take shape, but the writing still proceeds more through conceptual correspondence than through exhibition function. The problem is not that the works have been selected badly, but that the relationship between them still depends mainly on which type of waiting each one represents. The most effective revision here would be to define more clearly the specific role of each work within the full route: how the opening work changes bodily rhythm and attention as the viewer enters the space; how the works in the middle section organise waiting into a stretched condition through rules, distance, or route; and how the later works leave behind a lingering temporality. In this way, the relationships between the works would move beyond thematic relation and more clearly become experiential relation. Paul O’Neill’s The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s) would be helpful here, because it supports writing sequence, viewing rhythm, and the organisation of relations between works as curatorial logic rather than simple thematic juxtaposition.

The third issue concerns the entry conditions and display decisions that gradually emerge between Week 8 and Week 12. In Week 8, the author begins to address the title, booklet, and printed matter. In Week 9, threshold, dark-space notice, and access-centred entry are linked to viewing rhythm. By Weeks 10 to 12, the project develops further into site choice, moving image display, floor plan, circulation, and access planning. What now needs strengthening is the compression of these separate decisions into one clearer question: through what kind of entry is the viewer brought into waiting? What kind of entry is already implied by the title Right Here: While Waiting? Within the project, does the booklet function as explanation, guidance, or a delayed interpretive tool? Why are short moving-image works suited to monitor encounters, while longer works require darkened space and seating? What kinds of temporal experience do these two modes of display organise? Once these decisions are written more specifically, title, threshold, display, and access will become more clearly identifiable as parts of the exhibition structure. Beverly Serrell’s Exhibit Labels and Erika Balsom’s Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art would both be useful references here.

References

Baraitser, Lisa. Enduring Time. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350008151.

Bissell, David. “Animating Suspension: Waiting for Mobilities.” Mobilities 2, no. 2 (2007): 277–98. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450100701381581.

Balsom, Erika. Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art. London: Routledge, 2025. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003695134.

O’Neill, Paul. The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.

This week I began to look back at the whole project as a complete structure, rather than simply continuing to add new elements. After constant adjustments to routes, sites, artists, permissions, promotion, and maintenance over the previous weeks, I became more aware that the focus of the project is not how much can be included in the exhibition, but whether these parts can form a curatorial proposal that is internally coherent, accessible, and sustainable.

Looking back at the collective exhibition, I could see many traces of having existed. A short exhibition does not disappear entirely after deinstallation. However, those traces do not automatically become meaningful archives. Only when such records are consciously selected, arranged, and organised can people continue, after the event, to understand the exhibition’s structure, display logic, and public experience. From the curatorial point of view, I therefore came to realise that the afterlife of an exhibition also has to be curated.

This also changed how I understood my own project. I want people to continue to understand how invisible boundaries shape everyday life in Edinburgh even after the exhibition has ended. Because the project takes place in public space and is temporary, it has a strong sense of ephemerality. I therefore treat publication and archive as clearly defined parts of the project’s structure. Their purpose is to ensure that, even after the distributed project has ended, it still retains a form that can be revisited, re-entered, and reinterpreted. I am inclined to design a lighter form of legacy: a small digital archive containing visual records of the six sites, together with electronic content and AR-based visual material, so that viewers can still encounter the route and the sites as visual tools even without the physical works being present.

For me, one very inspiring precedent is Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s Night Walk for Edinburgh. What matters is not only that the work takes place in the city, but that this temporary, time-based viewing experience can continue to be read after the event through its guide and archival materials in the app. This helped me think more clearly about my own project: if my exhibition is temporary and distributed, then its continued existence cannot depend only on memory. It has to depend on those materials that allow the project to be re-entered and reread.

References

Art Fund. “Night Walk for Edinburgh.” 2019.

Fruitmarket. “Night Walk for Edinburgh: Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller.” 2019.

The Museum of Modern Art Archives. “Archives Exhibitions.”

The Museum of Modern Art Archives. “The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records, 1960–1969.”

This week, we mostly focused on how to promote the exhibition and on what other form it might take. Reflecting on our joint exhibition, Our Shell, I realized more practically how audience insights work. A work will not come to the audience. If the message is unclear or the presence in the city is weak, it may not be seriously received or understood. Here, Claire Bishop’s work on participatory art was helpful as it’s not just about whether people are there but how they are invited, how they are included. This helped me recognize that just because the work is in the city, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is participatory. Marketing draws people in, through, and out.

This is particularly true for my project. It is outdoors, but is not dependent on a single entry point, so visitors can’t usually be brought into the museum. Entrances must be coordinated across maps, QR codes, site boards, pamphlets, and online. Once we had realised this, visual design and printing had to be taken more seriously. It is not only for information, however, but also so that people understand, very quickly, that this is not a walk around the city or a sightseeing tour. It is a curatorial project interested in inequitable spatial practice.

I also began to think about the audiences for the project. Nina Simon points out that a cultural project is relevant when it relates to the lives of its audiences. To me, that means “the public” cannot be thought of as a monolithic group. More distinctions among residents, passers-by, commuters, and tourists are needed. Most residents are likely to perceive how tourism, commerce and spatial organisation impact long-term belonging so the project needs to have a stronger experiential appeal for them. Passers-by might pass more quickly, so needs to be visually and verbally accessible. Commuters might be in a hurry, so brief encounters need to be enabled. Tourists may have more time to explore, say, but they tend to know Edinburgh via canonical walking routes and a set of city tropes. In this way we saw that promotion is not just about getting more visitors to the exhibition. It is also about enabling these publics to get into it for themselves in their own time.

References

Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso, 2012.

Cardoso, Kristen. Review of Book Review: The Art of Relevance, Written by Nina Simon. Weave (Ann Arbor, Mich.) 1, no. 6 (April 2017). https://doi.org/10.3998/weave.12535642.0001.605.