A4, 154 pages, Colour printing, Perfect bound, Softcover, Includes zine supplement, 2025

This publication is a visual, textual, sonic, spatial and speculative reader of the Govan Graving Docks and their neighbourhood. The dossier assembles collaborative research undertaken by Aga Paulina Młyńczak, Nell Cardozo and Kelly Rappleye (16 Collective) and resident artist Eleni Wittbrodt, with communities in Govan between 2024 and 2025. 16 Collective’s Riverside Topographies is a long-term research project connecting artists with communities alongside urban waterways to imagine more just and democratic futures for these sites. The first phase of this project takes the Govan Graving Docks as its point of criticality at a pivotal moment in the site’s history.

Key contributions include Wittbrodt’s photographic collection Surface Reading, which experiments with visual access and oblique methods of surveying the now-fenced docks. Field recordings on-site (accessible by QR Codes) accompany “Visiting the lost world of the nearby”, a poem by Cardozo. In “The Govan Brassica”, Hmashya Rajkumar writes through soil beds, seed life and non-human inhabitation, following a seed collection workshop on the docks with Glasgow Seed Library. Govan Camera Club, a youth photo initiative based at Elder Park Library, contributes a collective visual mapping of topographies under transformation, offering a local counter-narrative to enclosure and speculative development.

Two contrapuntal interviews explore labour, industry and transition. Peter Breslin speaks with 16C about Dry Dock 3 and a life across industrial cycles. Rappleye interviews Khem Rogaly of Common Wealth on militarisation, economic justice and Clydeside’s cultural memory.

Młyńczak’s curatorial esssay “ENTER THE RIVERside” introduces the project’s slow, situated approach. Designs for a “Meeting Point” propose new infrastructures for coexistence, human and non-human, beside the docks.

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