A Landscape of Dwelling

This month is Gypsy Roma Traveller History Month, which we at Arc celebrate. Over the last year I have been researching and thinking about the Scottish Travellers and this led to me giving a talk entitled Home Wear at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam with the artist Joke Robaard. The event was in parallel with an exhibition, In Search of the Pluriverse, which includes a short film I made on Traveller culture.

As Scotland’s only indigenous ethnic minority, the Travellers hold much cultural wisdom distinct from the majority experience, which is a resource to help us all navigate our way to a more inclusive and generative future.

Much persecuted for centuries because of their difference, Travellers suffered assault, imprisonment, execution and forced removal of children, but are now to some degree legally protected in Scotland, though many still struggle to understand and appreciate their culture.

The Travellers contribution to Scotland’s culture is vested in an ancient way of life which prizes lived experience. Always moving on means you cannot accumulate many material possessions, but a super-rich oral and musical culture developed around millenia of campfire gatherings.

Traveller tents are a classic example of nomadic architecture – highly efficiently engineered and robust tensile fabric structures over curvilinear timber structures – a classic of low carbon, low impact design, which inspired our gridshell protostructure for COP26.

But the thing that soars above all this is the Traveller way of being, fundamentally different to that of we settled folk. Dwelling as an action not as an object, a verb rather than a noun. Travellers inhabit a landscape rather than a building - a tent is just a stopping place a long the way. Making your home anew every few days is a dedication to domestic architecture that no modern house can match. As the poem by Traveller Essie Stewart says

‘What care we though we be sae sma – the tent will stand when the palace shall fa!’

You can watch my film here and visit the exhibition in Rotterdam until late August.

And check out the work of Tom Klass who has produced a wonderful and much more professional film on the Roma in the Netherlands. Tom came along to our talk and we had a great discussion in the bar afterwards. Lots more work to be done………