SCAN Summit 2024

George Finlay Ramsay

GF Ramsay (b. Dundee, Scotland) is an artist working with poetry, ritual and analogue filmmaking. In 2017 & 2018 he burned hundreds of people’s regrets inside volcanoes across Eurasia. His fake epic poem Raven’s Reprise (2020) tells of a trickster raven travelling through the pandemic and remaking the world to her better designs. His short film CASTOROCENE (2021) sees beavers re-build the world after humans have destroyed it. Mid length film Family Fugue (2022) is about how we are haunted by, and in turn haunt our ancestors. Nursted, from the sleep side (2023) and Flesh, Wax & Glass (ongoing) deal with the idea of a house falling asleep, and the complexities of filming sacred blood rituals respectively. He is currently making plans to have his body thrown into a volcano after he dies.  In 2023 he was shortlisted for the Margaret Tait Award and his work has been presented at PAF Olomouc (CZ), Art Basel (CH), Barbican (UK), Beijing People’s Art Theatre (CN), BFI Southbank (UK), Camden Arts Centre (UK), Matadero (SP), LUX Scotland (SC) Rupert Residency (LT), Mubi, NTS Radio. This talk was recorded at the SCAN Summit 2024, titled ‘Who can impress the forest, bid the tree, unfix the earth-bound root?’, to mark 21 years of the Land Reform Act Scotland, at a time when ownership of and access to land, affordable housing and green space are crucial in rural and urban Scotland. In the era of rewilding, carbon credits and global tourism, we took inspiration from the surviving remnants of Birnam Wood to explore forest, field and stream.

Fionn Duffy

Fionn is an interdisciplinary artist from Glasgow who weaves spiralling narratives from multimodal research into stories of creation and disposal with a focus on material legacies and modern mythologies surrounding industry and environment. She addresses the transformation of fluid ecologies from the perspective of permeability with others by metabolising lessons from living and non-living collaborators. Fionn re-centers materials and events that occur at the 'periphery' as vital to the maintenance of the worlds we inhabit. Her recent work orbits historically neglected systems of production and distribution, attending to characters who haunt heterotopic sites such as archives, waterways and rubbish dumps. This talk was recorded at the SCAN Summit 2024, titled ‘Who can impress the forest, bid the tree, unfix the earth-bound root?’, to mark 21 years of the Land Reform Act Scotland, at a time when ownership of and access to land, affordable housing and green space are crucial in rural and urban Scotland. In the era of rewilding, carbon credits and global tourism, we took inspiration from the surviving remnants of Birnam Wood to explore forest, field and stream.

Lesley Young

Lesley Young is the Director of the Bothy Project. She has a background in visual arts curating and production. In 2021 she worked with Sean Lynch to make Tak’ Tent O’ Time Ere Time Be Tint, a co-commission between by Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop and Edinburgh Art Festival 2021. She is a founding member of the curatorial co-operative Chapter Thirteen and between 2007-10 initiated and ran The Salford Restoration Office with James N. Hutchinson, curating exhibitions with Jeremy Deller, Dan Shipsides and Artur Zmijewski, and developing projects with Imogen Stidworthy and Katya Sander. She is based in Glasgow. This talk was recorded at the SCAN Summit 2024, titled ‘Who can impress the forest, bid the tree, unfix the earth-bound root?’, to mark 21 years of the Land Reform Act Scotland, at a time when ownership of and access to land, affordable housing and green space are crucial in rural and urban Scotland. In the era of rewilding, carbon credits and global tourism, we took inspiration from the surviving remnants of Birnam Wood to explore forest, field and stream.

Josh Doble

Dr. Josh Doble is Policy Manager, Community Land Scotland, he leads on policy advocacy and development to ensure that the benefits of community ownership and further land reform are understood at a national and regional level. Part of this role is to promote the connections between land reform and various key national policies, such as the Just Transition to Net Zero, the response to the climate crisis, Community Wealth Building, Human Rights and the Wellbeing Economy. Josh has experience in research and policy within government and academia. His research background as a historian of decolonisation, with an interest in the politics of land and race in postcolonial societies, means he is particularly interested in the opportunities for progressive land reform within Scotland. This talk was recorded at the SCAN Summit 2024, titled ‘Who can impress the forest, bid the tree, unfix the earth-bound root?’, to mark 21 years of the Land Reform Act Scotland, at a time when ownership of and access to land, affordable housing and green space are crucial in rural and urban Scotland. In the era of rewilding, carbon credits and global tourism, we took inspiration from the surviving remnants of Birnam Wood to explore forest, field and stream.

Alison Scott

Alison Scott is an artist, writer and art-worker based in Scotland often working with other artists on projects. Her work is research-led, driven by film, performance and writing practices, and forefronts collaborative, speculative approaches to knowledge production. Recent projects—drawing on encounters with weather, oil, land, and the idea of the commons—engage with aspects of environmental politics on an everyday, situated level.  This talk was recorded at the SCAN Summit 2024, titled ‘Who can impress the forest, bid the tree, unfix the earth-bound root?’, to mark 21 years of the Land Reform Act Scotland, at a time when ownership of and access to land, affordable housing and green space are crucial in rural and urban Scotland. In the era of rewilding, carbon credits and global tourism, we took inspiration from the surviving remnants of Birnam Wood to explore forest, field and stream.