Devolutionary sites: NVA, Grid Iron and Scottish site-specificity in the 1990s

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyse the ways in which the productions of Scottish site-specific companies NVA and Grid Iron responded to the main political processes in Scotland in the 1990s, such as devolution. NVA’s initial engagement with post-industrial landscapes was motivated by political protest, but their later projects focused on technology and global connectivity through cross-media collaborations until the end of the decade, when they ventured to rural areas in their exploration of spirituality in the human-nature relationship. In all of their projects, site-specificity proved to be a convenient and highly innovative tool for creating a symbiosis between a site and the ethical concerns raised in it, whether economic, political, scientific or ecological. On the other hand, Grid Iron has been distinguished by its equal interest in new writing and site-specificity, thus contributing to the growing corpus of contemporary Scottish writing as well as engaging with identity politics.