My alter ego, Central Belt Shuffler, reported a couple of weeks ago on a visit to the Tramway‘s Glasgow International exhibition.

One of the artworks on show is Amie Siegel’s Provenance. In the lushly-shot film, the (wordless) narrative works backwards from chairs, desks and tables in beautifully designed western homes to high-cost furniture auctions, and finally to the crumbling, arch-modernist buildings of Chandigarh, where the furniture is shown in everyday contexts: offices, a library, a classroom, abandoned in a store. The exhibition also features a shorter film about the selling of the film itself at Christie’s, and includes the auction catalogue in which it featured.

Inspired by this, and also Lawrence Lek’s work QE3, I signed up to do a workshop based around these artworks. We were asked to bring in an object with some sort of history, and a photograph of a place. I took in a fossilised rock, and a photo of the aptly-named Stair Street, which is round the corner from where I live.

Led by Tramway’s Public Engagement Coordinator, we quickly got down to a series of writing exercises that culminated in our own filming of the objects and their (semi-fictionalised) provenance, as if for an auction . My imagination quickly turned to the turn of 19th and 20th century Glasgow, and the bloodcurdling murder of a prostitute.

Here’s the video we made – my piece features at c4:40, but my disembodied hand makes a sneaky appearance manoeuvring some of the other objects at various points.

GI Provenance Workshop from Holly Rumble on Vimeo.