Material is a new independent publishing project based in Glasgow, Scotland. The first issue of our magazine emerges from one of the most chaotic and disorientating moments in the city’s recent history. The far right is mobilised on the streets; battles over labour, housing, transport, the cost of living and political expression are raging; infrastructure is crumbling; and social, cultural and educational institutions are being picked apart, deliberately run down, or scrapped altogether. The ruthless critique of contemporary conditions—alongside an affirmation of processes of anti-capitalist struggle—is an urgent task in this maelstrom. By providing a space for incisive, pugnacious, in-depth writing on politics and culture, we hope Material can make a useful contribution to the infrastructure of critical, left-wing publishing in the city and beyond.
We approach this task in an open and reflexive manner, beginning with the desire to discover things we don’t already know and to bring hitherto under-acknowledged practices and trajectories into view. This means providing a forum for thorough, challenging and untimely work: work that situates events within a broader historical materialist framework, that looks beyond current trends and reactive interpretations, brushes against the grain and seeks to provide a synoptic view of contemporary issues. Our content is non-academic but scholarly and probing. In conditions of cultural and educational degradation, we value intellectuality in its broadest sense.
The inaugural issue of Material takes Glasgow as its point of departure, although not the limit of its concerns. Mandy McIntosh, Rahul Rao and Hussein Mitha examine tensions around monuments and public sculpture, while the city’s industrial past backdrops Hannah Proctor’s account of psychiatrist Thomas Ferguson Rodger’s interwar ‘dream-books’. Paul Pieroni scrutinises the operations of arts charity Outer Spaces, while Sean Baillie’s writing on the Central Belt’s peripheral towns and Hamish Kallin’s account of Edinburgh’s exurban edgelands extend the interrogation of urban space beyond Glasgow. Other contributions broaden the issue’s scope: Rosie Hampton insists on the urgency of returning to histories of left infrastructure in our current conjuncture; Onyeka Igwe and Joey Simons discuss anti-colonialist revolutionary theatre; and, in a wide-ranging interview, Chris O’Kane introduces the critical theory of domination. These longer pieces are interspersed with original poetry by Lotte L.S. and artwork by Shona Macnaughton and Roisin Rowe.
Conditions of production are rarely ideal, but we want to create as well as destroy.
Material editorial collective:
Benjamin Fallon
Ruth Gilbert
Neil Gray
Paul Pieroni
Hannah Proctor
Joey Simons