How to Bury a Hospital: Listening for the Ghosts of a Glasgow Institution

In 1805, a Lock Hospital opened in Glasgow for the compulsory confinement and treatment of women and girls suspected of carrying ‘venereal diseases’, or sexually transmitted infections. Although the institution remained in operation in different forms until the mid-twentieth century, much of its history has disappeared from the landscape. Student accommodation now stands on the site where the hospital once confined women in the name of public health.

Out of Bounds is a developing film and artistic research project by Madi Awadalla and Chaoying Rao. Bringing together archival research, moving image, performance and lived knowledge, the project traces the Lock Hospital as a place where medicine, moral policing, gender and sexual labour became entangled. It asks how institutions presented as spaces of care also operated through punishment, surveillance and incarceration, and what survives when their buildings and histories have apparently vanished.

For Hard Labour, Madi and Chaoying will share material, discoveries and unresolved questions from the project so far. The event will move between the history of the Glasgow Lock Hospital, the process of researching an institution structured by silence and stigma, and the possibilities of making work about sex workers’ histories without reproducing the forms of scrutiny through which those histories were recorded. The presentation will be followed by a conversation with the audience.