Welcome / Fàilte
Hello, and welcome to We Have Questions / Tha Ceistean Againn, an artist-led laboratory exploring social practice in rural and remote areas. This website, at its inception in early 2025, is a place to share some of the work that the lab has done of the last couple of years, and also to hear from some of its participants, who will be contributing blog posts here in the coming months.
By way of an introduction to the project, though, here is a little back story…
From 2021 to 2023, Cat Meighan and I were working with Culture Collective, a Scotland-wide residency programme that placed underemployed artists in communities and groups that were impacted in specific or particularly harsh ways by the pandemic.
Part of a group based in the Highlands, alongside Sinéad Hargan, Evija Laivina, Artair Donald and Lauren Hendry, Cat and I often found ourselves facing many of the same issues and questions from either side of a darkened glass. Cat was working in women’s refuges with survivors of rape, sexual assault and domestic violence; I was working in HMP Inverness, often with men charged with sex offences, and often with people dealing with the fallout from undiagnosed addictions and neurodivergences.
As the project went on we had the increasing sense that while we were each working in the other’s exclusion zone, we also had some kind of duty to attend to whatever it was (societal failings? toxic masculinity? the military-narco-sexual complex?) we were both orbiting. Mid-way through the residency we tried to find ways of sharing our participants’ work in the same space at an exhibition called Attend, letting words and movement, the aural and the visual, coexist without really making contact.
At the end of the project – a traditional moment of summation, conclusion and progress – we found ourselves stuck. There was a budget set aside for us to share what we’d learned, there was a year and a half of work behind us, there were spaces and rooms available, and there were communities apparently keen to hear from us.
The participants themselves – in both of our projects – were of course extremely cautious of any hint of the public gaze. This gave both of us difficult choices to think through, about representation, amplification and acknowledgement. We also shared an approach in which creativity was simply there for our participants in the moment of the workshop: we were extremely vigilant – as are, I think it’s safe to say, the vast majority of socially engaged artists – about the tendency of funders and third sector organisations to approach artists as a social panacea.
What was it, then, that we had to share? And who with?
What we had were questions. And the people we had been working alongside through Culture Collective and other projects also seemed to have questions.
And so we decided, essentially, to offer our budget to other artists to come together and share the questions they had, with us and with each other. It really could be any question at all, it just had to be something that had emerged from working in the arts and social engagement, and it needed to be a question that had particular relevance to the context of the Highlands and experiences of rurality, remoteness, northern-ness and Gaeldom.
The format is pretty simple.
First, we ask people to send us proposals for a question they’d like to explore, and how they’d like to use their practice to explore it.
Then, myself, Cat and others try to curate a coherent group of as many artists and practitioners as we can afford to host (so far, 17 one year and 13 the next), based anonymously on the proposals we recieve. Each one is either chosen to present their own session, or to be the respondent to someone else’s.
Finally, across two days at the Cromarty Arts Trust on the Black Isle, we gather to participate in each other’s investigations, talk, make, walk and cook.
There are only a few principles…
What we work on together is there for everyone to take home. We Have Questions is a knowledge commons and a project that only works through collectivity.
We Have Questions is work, and participants are fed, given board, and paid union rates for their participation.
We Have Questions is a work-in-progress. We have only done this twice at the time of writing, and each iteration has revealed a hundred things we need to change. So while this site will hopefully give you an impression of what we do (and hopefully encourage you to join us!) all we can really guarantee is that next time, it will be different.