Le Swimming

A disused underground car park under a modern tower in Glasgow's city centre was imagined as a swimming pool. In this alternate history, a vision of a past utopia, the car park becomes a doorway to another world, twice removed form its current status of abandonment. Artists Nadege Druzkowski, Sukaina Kubba, Jenny Lewis, Philippe Murphy, Alys Owen and Beth Shapeero transform this space into the body of a swimming pool, with works that explore the idea of 'other spaces' on the one hand, while reacting to the transformation of the car park on the other.

The introduction of a fictional past (swimming pool) to an existing heterotopic space (underground car park) evokes the utopian origins of modernist residential tower blocks, where open spaces, freed by the piling up of apartments, were envisioned as spaces of leisure and recreation. The abandoned car park highlights the abandonment of otherwise profitable urban spaces due to current economic conditions; the fictional pool is both a comment on the lack of non-commercial public spaces in the city centre and the dissolution of the follies of modernist housing.

A series of related events and performances accompanied the exhibition.