The Invisible College - Building Communities of Creative Practice

The Invisible College is a research initiative proposed for the contested site of St Peter’s Seminary and the Kilmahew estate in the west of Scotland. A partnership of academics and leading public arts organisation NVA will organise a series of workshops to stimulate engagement with the site. These will bring together local residents, architects, artists, writers, academics, public sector and third sector stakeholders. There will be a focus on community collaboration and exploring new methods for engaging with environmental change.

St Peter’s Seminary was a training centre for priests built by renowned architects Gillespie, Kidd and Coia. Opened in 1966, it is cited as Scotland’s finest example of modernist architecture, but failures in built structure and changes in the teaching practices of the Catholic church led to its closure in 1980. Since then, there have been profound changes in the site’s environment. The infiltration of weather and vandals has led to rapid decay of the seminary, turning it into an iconic and infamous modern ruin. The surrounding Kilmahew estate, a Victorian designed woodland landscape, has become wild and overgrown, its rich ecosystem slowly invading the seminary. This heritage sets a haunting mood across the site: a concrete ghost ship adrift in an enchanted forest. But the site offers more than a voyeuristic daytrip for architectural pilgrims. It remains a stunning location at the edge of Greater Glasgow between the villages of Cardross and Renton, set in lush rolling countryside with views across the Firth of Clyde.

The site’s future is highly contested. Alongside the ever-present threat of demolition, various commercial schemes have been proposed, but all have proved unworkable. The seminary is A-listed, does not easily lend itself to new functions, and reparation costs are substantial. Over the last three years, public arts charity NVA have been working with academics, artists, writers, architects to formulate a more sustainable and environmentally sensitive approach to the site’s regeneration: non-profit, rooted in consultation and collaboration with local communities, aiming to harness the power of the site to stimulate public engagement with the landscape.

The Invisible College will build on these activities by:

- Drawing out and recording the variety of perceptions, readings and values attributed to the site and its rich environments.
- Forging connections and engendering ongoing collaboration between project participants.
- Documenting these practices for research and publication.
- Feeding into the development of NVA’s long term plans for the site.

Three workshops will be held at the site, bringing together local residents from Renton and Cardross and leading international academics, writers and artists from the fields of cultural geography, architecture, landscape architecture, environmental art and anthropology. The workshops will be led by an experienced community facilitator. Creative and artistic methods will be used, chosen in consultation with the local communities. These might include: gathering written and oral memories of the site; compiling local history archives (books, objects, photos, cine film); on-line broadcasts or podcasts; story-telling sessions; designing and mapping paths; plant survey and propagation; hut, shelter and bothy building; preparing new community food growing spaces.

Project outputs will include:
- Interactive pages on NVA’s website to share documentation from the workshops.
- A bi-monthly chapbook (pdf and paper copy) documenting the project’s activities, and including contributions from the local communities.
- An audio work to be listened to when walking around the site on MP3 players, or via the web. This will be launched at a field trip to the site as part of the 2012 Royal Geographical Society (RGS) annual conference. It will also be presented via the RGS’s ‘Discovering Places’ website.
- Journal articles to share the project’s findings with academic audiences.

Who will benefit from this research?
1. People who attend one or more of the workshops and/or meetings as participants. The range of selected participants is diverse in interest, experience and profession, and includes: personnel from NVA; a cross section of residents from the local communities (16 at each workshop); former St. Peter’s seminarians; public and third sector stakeholders from the Roman Catholic Church, Scottish Natural Heritage, Creative Scotland and Historic Scotland; artists from Scottish schools of art; and a range of invited researchers and experts from the UK and worldwide, both academic and non-academic, including writers, architects and landscape architects, artists, curators, geographers and anthropologists.

2. Academics (25) who attend the researchers’ field trip to the site, which will form part of the pre-conference events for the Royal Geographical Society annual conference 2012. These will most likely be mainly geographers, but given the interdisciplinary scope of the conference some will be from other backgrounds and interests.

3. The wider public, not only those unable to attend events but also more diverse interested parties, on-line locally or internationally. This will include, for example, people whose engagement with the site will be via the Royal Geographical Society’s ‘Discovering Britain’ online project (including families, teachers and the general public). Some of these people may download the audio walk and use this to enhance their engagement with the site when visiting it; others will read about the site remotely, viewing pictures and listening to the audio via the internet.

How will they benefit from the research?
The project has the potential to make a significant contribution to the UK’s culture and environment, and more specifically to practices of heritage, conservation and redevelopment.

The immediate contribution will be made at the site of St. Peter’s/Kilmahew, bringing benefits to the local communities, and the enormous range of stakeholders and interest groups for whom the site is important. The project will help to make the site, its rich environmental resources and contested cultural heritage more accessible to these people through a combination of participatory workshops on site, interim meetings, a researchers field trip and an audio walk (both onsite and online). These benefits are likely to be felt during the project and for around 12 months afterwards.

In the longer term, over the 5-10 years following the end of the project, there will be a number of more diffuse benefits. These will include:

- Strengthening NVA’s long term plans for the redevelopment of the site. The benefits of this will be to help NVA create a successful flagship national site for environmental art, research and learning, knowledge exchange and community involvement. This will have significant potential for benefits for the culture, creativity and wellbeing of Scotland and the UK. For example, the workshops may lead to the establishment of community growing spaces on site, with associated benefits for health and happiness.

- Contributions to practices of, and ideas about, the redevelopment of contested sites. This would be at an international level. NVA’s presentation of their plans for St. Peter’s/Kilmahew at the Venice Biennale International Architecture Exhibition 2010, and their links with Latz + Partner architects (whose work is internationally recognized as a pioneering approach to post-industrial landscape architecture), clearly indicate that their work at St. Peter’s has the potential to become a globally recognized exemplar of sustainable, creative, environmentally sensitive, participatory redevelopment. By showing how arts, research and community engagement can be brought together to foster positive environmental change, the site will inspire other communities in other contested sites to find their own solutions.