'Feverish City' is the first in a series of experimental texts written in response to a walking workshop held in Glasgow in 2019. Interspersed with a concrete poem about the beach at Irvine. 'Feverish City' is constructed in such a way to represent sediments and structures within the urban and coastal environments that the writer inhabits and moves between, as part of their creative research practice. 
Photograph from the Workshop ‘Fieldnotes on adrift-ness’ Glasgow 2019. Image Courtesy, India Boxall and MUCK Space.
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Small mountains form and drift along slicked earth
As I push hair behind my ears and let the melodic crash steer my body
Remote-ness can be a motive for cohesion
and co-habitancy that does more to encourage flourishing rather than disrupt it. Living
spaces, ones dense with biodiversity and
worldings, are lacking in abundance where I stay.
As a city dweller
it becomes apparent that concrete and brickwork curate my ambles, twisting my routes to fit
the overarching urban plan.
Much of the buildings in this particular city are being demolished,
and new fabrications poised to be positioned in their wake. Wrenching, hauling, drilling; an
orchestra of
matter being pulled apart, collected, ground up and used as rubble to create foundations,
paired with the shouting of the neon-clad
workforce who carry out these practices. Areas of construction become territories planned to
a meticulous level. They have destinies.
Building sites transform into sites of experience, thus becoming sites of memory. Sites that
act as hosts to memory exist within
remote and non-remote environments, however remote-ness lends itself to the more-than-
human other and lends itself to notions of
distance, remote-ness and adrift-ness within the urban landscape.
The mapping of a city is a political act. Cartographies are politically imbued things; they
illustrate borders and territories whilst
telling us where we have not yet been. The colonial acts in our ancestry knot us to the way in
which we attempt to divide and share
the blocks of land, making up streets, squares and passages. The land is planned, with non-
beautiful yet necessary objects like pipes and cables
buried in order to keep the appearance of effortless functionality. It is only when the earth is
dredged up that you can see the
mud-covered guts of the structured world and remember that you are standing in a forged
landscape.
Remote-ness feels near impossible within these heavily designed boroughs. It is something
out of reach, a bus or train ride away, over the horizon towards
what Rebecca Solnit describes as the ‘blue of distance’;. Remote-ness is an escape from
reality, a dream that performs to unburden us from
metropolitan life. Once experienced, the city dweller leaves remote-ness behind and starts
saving up time to visit there again. Back to
the endless scroll of beach and field that falls under the ‘escape’ hashtag on Instagram,
locked into a screen in the palm of your hand.
Scrambling up sanded banks with toes spread
A nod to the webbed feet of herring gulls gliding over quaking and soft dunes
Can remote-ness be useful if it is performative? Recently, artist collaborator and friend
Shona and I and lead a silent walk to a derelict park in Glasgow.
The silence was ‘informed’ in the sense that we made a conscious decision to use group
silence to support our inner thoughts and our
interactions with the places along the walk. Silence became our bond, with the act of walking
an important counterpart to the lack of sound.
We endeavoured to produce no human sound until we got to the park, where, as a group,
we prized open our silence with chatter about
walking, wastelands and to what significance did it have that our group was comprised
entirely of womxn? We spoke of the park itself,
which is made up of uneven slabs of grassland overlapping each other and connected by
steps that have been carved out of the earth. The park
has a stage-like appearance to it, evoking the spatiality of an ancient theatre, whereby urban
melodramas had played out. Looking around,
we could see relics of these social fissures across the horizontal plains: areas scorched
black from fire, with smashed glass pieces
dusting the uneven surface of the ground like confetti. A marriage had taken place here,
between a landscape cast to the category of baron space,
and the people who seek the forgotten land-facets of urban dwelling in order to socialise,
become intoxicated or perhaps for somewhere to sleep in the warmer months.
The park is surrounded by a part panoramic view of hill and mountain side, stretching North
towards the Cairngorms and the edge of the sky, the
point where the eyes can hardly reach, causing the brain to make up the rest of the picture
using snapshots from memory and imagination. Our group stood with this backdrop
cradling us and as we prepared to return to the city centre in silence, we spoke of one last
feeling that had been induced by the experience thus far: presence.
Presence is sought on a scale previously untold, as we seek the event horizon of experience
whilst living our on-line and on-screen lives. Our group’s
joint silence, paired with the physical act of walking and the sense of the air becoming
fresher and
as we rose
from the motorway-clad city to one of its highest points in altitude. Presence, a state adrift
from our schematic comprehension of life, is the antithesis
to remote-ness within linguistics. However, here, presence became remote-ness, as our
united silence informed us of how stifling urbanisation can be, not only
physically but metaphysically.
Biting my thumb nail,
Sand gets in my mouth and I crunch down on microscopic shell all the way home
When I think of remote-ness, I think of states of adrift-ness and being that are tied to land as
drama is tied
to a stage. In the city, more-than-human events do play out in the bad-lands, the edges and
corners of the amphitheatre of life-worlds. However, these symbiotic interactions are ever
swallowed by a lattice of steel and concrete. Presence, remote-ness and adrift-ness could
be defined
as existing in the areas of lack in the urban landscape, the non-curated gaps in a city that
evoke un-tidiness and unwanted-ness as they do not meet the aesthetic planned by
developers.
Thus, these areas of lack can inform creative practice. A creative practice that seeks to
reside in the interstitial, the precarious and
divergent is a contingency to the Western neo-Capitalist and Neo-liberal manifolds that
trickle into socio-economic placemaking.
Visiting a body of water as a body of water
Cold seeps
Wet infinity
Feverish city
————————————————India Boxall is a creative researcher who resides in Glasgow. Her practice, comprised of critical art writing and visual art, is rooted in prizing open situated knowledge using an ecofeminist perspective. India is the co-editor of MUCK (Must Use Critical Knowledge), a fledgling library currently existing online that promotes text dedicated to untangling hegemonic claims to knowledge. Instagram:@demfeelinz@muck_spaceWebsite:indiaboxall.infomuckspace.info