What's happening at the Glasgow Doors Open Days Digital Festival

21/8/2020

Get to know the buildings and untold stories we're unlocking in this year's digital festival.

At a time when our ability to explore our city is more restricted than usual, we've decided to take the Glasgow Doors Open Days Festival online for the first time. The world may be changing around us, but our participants are still here to open their doors and tell their stories to you.

We're bringing you more than 100 digital events from Monday 14th - Sunday 20th September, with an exciting array of webinars, virtual galleries, short films and downloadable audio tours giving you a new window onto Glasgow's heritage.

Bookings for our live webinars will open on Tuesday 1st September.

Unlocking Glasgow’s buildings… digitally

Starting from Monday 14th September, you’ll be granted special access to Glasgow’s stunning architecture right here on our website.

Take a virtual walk through our city’s landmarks in our video tours, Q&As, and online galleries, perhaps peeking into the backstage area of Barrowland Ballroom in a series of photographs, or taking a trip up the iconic Finnieston Crane in a short film commissioned for the festival.

Some of our buildings will be featured in live video tours on Facebook, while others will have a live Q&A session in Zoom. The events held in Zoom are marked as webinars in our brochure, and you can reserve your spot in them from 10am on Tuesday 1st September.

Unveiling histories

The theme for this year’s festival is Untold Stories, so we’ll be spending the week investigating some of Glasgow's more marginalised histories and lesser known tales.

We’ll learn about the secret Soviet map of Glasgow, part of a massive covert operation undertaken by the USSR during the Cold War. We’ll contribute stories to the Queer Distance project, which is collecting memories of places across the city from the LGBTQ+ community. And in a talk led by the University of Glasgow, we’ll continue the vital conversations we began having over the summer about how we can appropriately remember our colonial past without appearing to celebrate it.

There’s lots on offer encouraging us to take an alternative view of Glasgow’s buildings and to dig deeper into our heritage. Read our full live events programme here.

The city in cinema

On top of the collection of short films that we’ve commissioned exploring places like the City Chambers or the Finnieston Crane, the Glasgow Short Film Festival will present a selection of short films - both Scottish and international - that reflect on urban environments: how do we live within our cities and how do they affect us? How are they designed, who benefits, and who is excluded?

These films will be available online for 48 hours from their premiere on Wednesday 16th September. More details on how to watch will follow.

Get outside

Guided walks have become a mainstay at our festivals over the years, and 2020 will be no different.

Use the app GuidiGO to download one of our audio tours to take with you on a walk - or a cycle - around the city. You’ll find guided tours exploring places like Glasgow’s vibrant mural trail, the historic Glasgow Cross, or some of the contemporary art strewn across the city.

Download GuidiGO from the Apple Store or Google Play.

Enter our photography competition

Architecture and our built environment help structure and give form to our sense of place. It is the buildings which populate our streets that anchor and store many of our experiences and stories for later, waiting to be rediscovered or found.
In our photography competition, we invite you to share your encounters with sense of place. Your image should show the building or space in its wider context or environment, capturing not only its physicality but also the feelings or emotions you feel when you interact with or see this site. Through examination of your everyday environment and Glasgow through your eyes, we hope to see untold stories.
Your Brief

Select a building on a one of your favourite Glasgow streets
Capture the building’s purpose and how it anchors or holds the street together
You can focus on a specific detail or element of the building or approach it as a whole
Can be a new or old building - think about how you can convey the building’s history
In your caption use up to 50 words to tell a us why this building adds to your sense of place in the city.

Photographs can be submitted via email with the hashtag #GDODFUntold in the subject line doorsopendays@gbpt.org

You can also send your submissions on social media - Upload your picture on instagram, tag @glasgowdoorsopendaysfestival and use the hashtag #GDODFUntold. Please include the location of your building in your submission caption.

Prize sponsored by Gulabi, Glasgow’s independent film developing and scanning lab based in the South Side.

Where to find us online

Use these links below to access our digital offerings:

Website: https://www.glasgowdoorsopendays.org.uk/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/glasgowDoorsOpenDays
Instagram: @glasgowdoorsopendaysfestival
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCa7X-eaS75XtOB25w1DhgoQ
Twitter: @GlasgowDOD

We look forward to you joining us online next month to celebrate Glasgow’s fascinating architecture and heritage. We hope that you will take the advantage this year to virtually explore parts of the city, visit buildings and hear from people that you might not have been aware of, or likely to stumble upon as part of your usual physical festival.