Adura Onashile's Ghosts and the Marginal(ised) Histories of Glasgow's Merchant City

Adura Onashile’s Ghosts produced by the National Theatre of Scotland is a location based augmented reality app and walking tour of the Merchant City area of Glasgow, told from the perspective of a young 18th Century black man. This part of the city was built on the wealth of Glasgow’s merchant traders, many of whom directly profited from the slave trade. The links to slavery are part of an often hidden history that is rarely taught about and Ghosts aims to “explore the myth of Scotland's collective amnesia of slavery and racialised wealth, of empire and identity”. The piece will premiere under COVID-19 restrictions in April and May 2021. I would like to use my paper for TaPRA 2021 to reflect on some of the questions that the piece poses in response to the Performance and New Technologies theme of boundaries, margins and glitches; namely, how does the AR technology in Ghosts allow us to inhabit the liminoid spaces of Glasgow’s slave trading history? in what ways can Ghosts be seen as creating a glitch in the everyday narratives of Glasgow’s streets? How can the piece itself be seen as existing in the boundaries between mediums?