1. Project Premise

The central question of this project is straightforward but difficult: for whom is public space actually allowed to function? I am interested in how openness is arranged, limited, and unevenly experienced, rather than assuming that public space is naturally shared. The issue cannot be reduced to a simple opposition between residents and tourists. What matters is how tourism, infrastructure, commercial visibility, and managed movement work together to shape public space. Some people remain at ease. Others are pushed towards the edge.

2. Curatorial Format

The project is designed as a self-guided outdoor exhibition linked through Edinburgh’s public transport network. Route 35 functions as the main structure connecting the sites. The bus is not only a practical device. It is part of the curatorial argument. The exhibition unfolds through infrastructure rather than simply taking place beside it.

3. Why This Structure Is Necessary

The project adopts a non-linear structure because it should not depend on one fixed route or one authorized order of interpretation. Viewers may enter from different points, decide how long to stay, and connect the sites in their own way.

At the same time, readability still matters. A project without one dominant sequence can easily become fragmented. For that reason, route design, site prompts, and interpretive tools need to work harder. The main challenge is clear: the structure must be strong enough for dispersed entry to remain meaningful.

4. Main Concerns

The project approaches its main concerns through three points of entry. First, it examines how tourism reshapes everyday public space, especially where commercial attraction starts to outweigh public need. Second, it focuses on rules that are rarely written down but still affect who feels able to stay, pause, or return. Third, it treats public space as socially produced rather than naturally neutral, and asks how management, infrastructure, and repeated patterns of movement organize space in practice.

5. Theoretical Framework

The project is informed by critical spatial theory. Henri Lefebvre’s argument that space is socially produced gives me a way to understand public space as something built through power, use, and repetition rather than given in advance. Doreen Massey pushes this further. Her writing treats space as relational, contested, and always under negotiation. Together, these frameworks allow me to read Edinburgh as a city in which wider tensions become sharply visible.

6. Site Logic

The project is currently organized around six sites in Edinburgh, linked through bus travel. The six-site structure is intended to register different forms of invisible boundary. Movement between sites is equally important. It creates comparison. It exposes uneven experience. It prevents the project from collapsing into a single example.

7. AR as an Interpretive Method

AR is proposed here as an interpretive method. I am using it because it can bring different spatial layers into view at the same location and from the same perspective. At selected sites, viewers would be able to access simple AR overlays on their phones. A place that now appears stable and familiar could then be re-read as the result of commercial pressure, redirected movement, spatial replacement, and selective visibility. The point is not technological novelty. The point is to interrupt the assumption that the present condition of a site is natural.

8. Indicative Artist Candidates

The project now has a relatively clear shortlist of artist candidates. These names function as realistic references through which I can test how different forms of intervention might support the argument of the project.

Chris Johanson

Chris Johanson is relevant because his work attends to everyday texture, emotional colour, and the relation between ordinary life and environment. What matters here is not formal similarity. His work offers a way of addressing subtle and affective tensions in public space, especially in places where daily urban life collides with commercial visibility.

Toby Paterson

Toby Paterson is currently the strongest visual reference for the project. His abstract language responds directly to spatial structure, movement, and urban rhythm. The project needs a way to make pathways, circulation, and infrastructural order visible without falling back on simple explanation. Among the three candidates, his practice aligns most closely with the spatial and visual logic of the project.

Clara Ursitti

Clara Ursitti opens another valuable direction. Her scent-based work refuses to keep spatial experience within the visual. Smell can shape the atmosphere. It can also shift attention. At certain sites in this project, where managed public image and lived environmental experience do not fully match, sensory contrast may be a productive way of making that gap perceptible.

9. Publics

The project is aimed mainly at local residents and visitors. It also addresses commuters, passers-by, and those who move through Edinburgh without necessarily questioning how that movement is organized.

10. Practical and Ethical Conditions

The proposal is intended as a temporary, low-impact, and accessible project. Interventions should remain lightweight. Routes need to stay publicly navigable. Accessibility must be treated as part of the curatorial method and considered from the start.

Because the project depends on connections between different sites, permission strategy, route planning, and risk awareness also become part of its critical structure. A public-space exhibition has to remain ethically and conceptually coherent if it is to hold together at all.

References

City of Edinburgh Council. “About the Edinburgh Visitor Levy.” Accessed 14 April 2026. https://www.edinburgh.gov.uk/business/visitor-levy-edinburgh.

City of Edinburgh Council. “The Scheme for the Edinburgh Visitor Levy.” Accessed 14 April 2026. https://www.edinburgh.gov.uk/business/scheme-edinburgh-visitor-levy.

Kester, Grant H. “Dialogical Aesthetics: A Critical Framework for Littoral Art.” Variant 2, no. 9 (Winter 1999/2000).

Fitzgerald, William, and Efrossini Spentzou, eds. The Production of Space in Latin Literature. First edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: Sage, 2005.

McGillivray, David, Alba Colombo, and Xavier Villanueva. “Tensions and Disputes over Public Space in Festival Cities: Insights from Barcelona and Edinburgh.” Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events (Abingdon) 14, no. 3 (September 2022): 229–41. https://doi.org/10.1080/19407963.2022.2032109.

This week, the development of my individual curatorial project focused on two connected areas: artist selection and public feasibility. As the questions raised over the previous weeks became clearer, I began to define my criteria for selecting artists. Because the whole project is structured around non-linear viewing, I did not begin by asking whether an artist “fits the theme”. Instead, I looked at whether their practice treats space as an experience in its own right, rather than simply as a backdrop for the work. In this project, how audiences move, how they enter a site, and how they form a viewing experience through routes are all direct parts of the exhibition structure.

Secondly, because the project is explicitly concerned with the inequalities in Edinburgh’s public space produced by tourism, movement, and institutional management, I need artistic practices capable of addressing spatial conditions that are not directly visible, yet continue to shape who can remain, who becomes more visible, and whose actions are treated as legitimate. What I am looking for, then, is not simply urban-themed work, but methods that can make hidden structures more perceptible.

From my current position, I also need to confront a practical question: what does it actually mean to curate in public space? This project does not follow the model of a traditional gallery exhibition, so its feasibility within the real city environment must be assessed in advance. Public space is not a stable, open, always-available display site. Different locations have different rhythms of use, and any intervention must be adjusted in relation to risk conditions. This is not an extra technical step. It has to be treated as an inseparable part of the project’s method.

Edinburgh, as a major festival city, constantly reorganises public space through tourist volume, temporary events, and commercial pressure. Spaces that appear open often become subordinated to controlled patterns of movement. Risk assessment therefore, directly affects my curatorial judgement. I need to understand not only how workers enter the city, but also under what conditions public relations can actually be formed. Artist selection helps me determine what kinds of artistic language the project requires, while risk assessment helps me judge whether that language is truly workable in a real urban environment. Together, these two strands have made me more aware that public space is already a field of uneven use, and that curating within it means reorganising the relationship between viewing and access.

References

McGillivray, David, Alba Colombo, and Xavier Villanueva. “Tensions and Disputes over Public Space in Festival Cities: Insights from Barcelona and Edinburgh.” Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events (Abingdon) 14, no. 3 (September 2022): 229–41. https://doi.org/10.1080/19407963.2022.2032109.

Quagliarini, Enrico, Gabriele Bernardini, Guido Romano, and Marco D’Orazio. “Users’ Vulnerability and Exposure in Public Open Spaces (Squares): A Novel Way for Accounting Them in Multi-Risk Scenarios.” Cities 133 (February 2023): 104160. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2022.104160.

Richards, Greg, and Maria del Pilar Leal Londoño. “Festival Cities and Tourism: Challenges and Prospects.” Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events (Abingdon) 14, no. 3 (September 2022): 219–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/19407963.2022.2087664.

Robazza, Guido, Jacqueline Priego-Hernández, Silvio Caputo, and Alessandro Melis. “Temporary Urbanism as a Catalyst for Social Resilience: Insights from an Urban Living Lab Practice-Based Research.” Buildings (Basel) (BASEL) 14, no. 6 (June 2024): 1513. https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings14061513.