Counter-mapping the marginalised histories of Glasgow in Adura Onashile’s AR walking tour Ghosts

Adura Onashile’s Ghosts (produced by the National Theatre of Scotland) is a site-specific augmented reality app and walking tour of the Merchant City area of Glasgow, told from the perspective of a young 18th Century enslaved 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 a partially hidden history and Ghosts aims to ‘Scotland's collective amnesia of slavery and racialised wealth, of empire and identity’ (National Theatre of Scotland 2021b). The piece premiered under COVID-19 restrictions in April and May 2021 and took place as a solo walking tour through the city, led by the app. Drawing on my own experience of the work in May 2021, as well as an interview with Onashile conducted for the ‘Walking Publics / Walking Arts’ project in 2022, this chapter reflects on some of the questions that the piece poses in relation to the edited collection’s theme of ‘mapping’, namely the ways that site-specific AR experiences create the possibility to explore ‘counter-mapping’ practices (Springgay and Truman 2018) and ‘performance cartographies’ (Myers and Frears 2021). By revealing the hidden narratives in our everyday built environment site-specific performance with technology can map ‘against dominant power structures’ (Springgay and Truman 2018, 99), reveal marginalised histories and generate new historiographies. This chapter explores the ways that Ghosts transformed the conventional format of smartphone enabled digital map navigation into an alternative mapping of place that ‘offer[ed] an experiential movement through the textured embodied and storied depth of place’ (Myers and Frears 2021) that challenges Glasgow’s ‘collective amnesia’ of its role in the slave trade.