EDINBURGH.- This summer, Collective presents two new, distinct artist commissions across the City Observatory site and online. Using the City Observatory site as a springboard, Collective’s programme considers the hidden histories and untold stories relating to our site and wider cultural history.

Bringing together new work by Annette Krauss and Camara Taylor, the summer programme of solo exhibitions and events reframes and questions complex figures, movements and systems whose legacies are woven into our collective cultural memory. All projects have been developed with the artists, in some cases over a number of years, to explore how the legacies of the past can be reconsidered and re-presented to help us re-imagine the present and future.

Annette Krauss

Artist, educator and writer, Annette Krauss has been working with Collective over several years on A Matter of Precedents, a long-term research project exploring the ‘common good’. Annette’s collaborative work is dedicated to practices of ‘unlearning’ and ‘commoning’, addressing questions of institutional responsibilities, feminism, and privilege.

A Matter of Precedents explores the City Observatory’s status and designation as a ‘common good asset’ and has been developed in dialogue with those involved in Collective’s redevelopment of the site, alongside artists and cultural thinkers. The ‘common good’ is a form of collective property, unique to Scotland, comprising buildings, land, structures, and monuments gifted to the people of a specific area. Drawing on her research on the commons, the artist’s project considers the specificity and lack of visibility of the Scottish commons, particularly in Edinburgh; and draws on Collective’s journey to the City Observatory as a way to explore the (imaginative) potential of the ‘common good’ as a particular legal, historically philanthropic, early capitalist anomaly entangled with colonial histories.




A research resource will be presented in Collective’s City Observatory Library and an online presentation will launch in August. The resource includes information on the ‘common good’ in Edinburgh along with propositions to imagine future uses for other common good sites. Material has been brought together to demystify and expose some of the legal mechanisms and institutional processes around publicly owned items.

Camara Taylor

As part of Collective’s Satellites Programme, Glasgow-based artist Camara Taylor presents backwash. Satellites is Collective’s development programme for emergent practitioners based in Scotland.

backwash can refer to the cleaning of filters, the receding of waves, backward currents or the reverberations of a particular event. It is also a name for the saliva infused liquid mixtures at the bottom of drinking vessels.

In this exhibition these fluid actions are mixed with their ongoing explorations of silt, slop and snaps. Through backwash, Camara offers new video and mixed-media works recomposed from the sighs and groans of a sinking kingdom; a short-lived Company; several ports and a pistol.

Annette Krauss co-initiates long-term participatory practices such as Sites for Unlearning; Hidden Curriculum; Spaces of Commoning; Readin; Read the Masks. Tradition is Not Given; School of Temporalities. These projects reflect and build upon the potential of collaborative practices while aiming at disrupting taken for granted truths in imagining and living forms of collectivity.

Camara Taylor’s recent works include: A rant! A reel! curated by Languid Hands at Cubitt, London; holus-bolus commissioned by Edinburgh Art Festival as part of What happens to desire... curated by Tako Taal (2021); l; suspiration!, a film organised around queefs and other utterances for The Newbridge Project, Gateshead (2021); and sorry I missed you, an e-publication of collages for The Second Life, Edwin Morgan Trust & Saltire Society (2020/21). They have undertaken residencies at Market Gallery, Glasgow (2020), The National Theatre of Scotland, Glasgow (2019) and Fresh Milk, St George (2015). Camara previously participated in Curatorial Directions at MAC Belfast (2019); Constellations (UP Projects/ FTHo, 2017-18) and was a Committee Member at Transmission Gallery from 2016 to 2018.