When world ending as opposed to world building, what do we leave behind? What detritus is left of the collective endeavours, the touch, the sight, the conjunctively lived and felt, from the time that came after the future inevitably ended? What were our shared belongings? Federico Campagna makes a good point: when choosing what to leave behind, it doesn't need to be totally objective. Maybe this experiment in building ‘a new generation’ was only ever a spectacular play schemed to teach us something?

Cumbernauld was imagined as a utopia for living. A Scottish New Town developed to ease Glasgow’s overcrowding, it was born in 1955 from the modernist belief that society could be reshaped through design. This design centred a bold architectural experiment: a monolithic Brutalist megastructure that housed a nursery, a library, penthouse flats, shops, offices, social services, restaurants, a hotel and even, latterly, two competing nightclubs, all in one labyrinthine concrete complex. Raised walkways separated people from cars; communal living was prioritised over the individual. The town centre was a vision of the future.

Yet the town centre was never completed, and underinvestment and embezzlement would catalyse the project’s failure. Concrete weathered. Services declined. Communities, displaced from Glasgow and other cities, found themselves alienated in a place where nothing quite worked. Unemployment rocketed from the late 1970s onwards, and much of the town's already struggling built environment became associated with social isolation and deprivation. The abuse of the buildings left its mark on the inhabitants. Over time, Cumbernauld became a byword for the failures of modernist planning, a symbol of dystopia rather than utopia. In 2022, North Lanarkshire Council announced plans to demolish the megastructure entirely. The demolition is scheduled for 2027 to make way for a new shopping centre.

“Ahead of its blowing up, what was there?” Katie Shannon asks. In DEVOCORPOSTO, the artist responds to the impending erasure of her hometown with a series of laboured drawings, print, textile and metal work which she describes as “re-makes, cover versions” – of lost public imagery and civic detritus: late-night throbs of E in local nightclubs; reflections in a shop window drawn from bodycam footage taken by Shannon in the town centre. An assemblage of hand-embellished and embroidered school shirts and ties references a piece of public art in Cumbernauld’s underpass. A screenprint on the wall reproduces a gable end adorned with a state-commissioned mural of doves by Brian Miller, Cumbernauld’s appointed town artist from the 1960s to 1980s. Various shades of blue – so-called “council blue”, New Labour blue, blue collar, Le Corbusier blue – run throughout. Nearby hangs a tiny replica of the displaced St Enoch Clock, a local landmark known to always tell the wrong time, its hands etched with hardcore til I die in happy hardcore font, a popular local music genre. The clock hands are set to 3:23 am, the congregation time after a standard club closing hour.

Lying on a pile of blue folders is Shannon’s Cumbernauld Development Corporation Report 2027, a riff on the town’s real 1987 annual report, the cover of which featured a group of schoolchildren dressed in business suits with the slogan “A new generation”. Shannon identifies this moment as pivotal in Cumbernauld’s history, signalling a shift from the town’s socialist roots to new neoliberal aspirations. Alongside bodycam shots of the town centre and images of the original report, Shannon includes a portrait of Mary, fifteen, who currently lives in Cumbernauld. Mary wears a shirt and paper tie, echoing the suited youths of the original 1987 report. In his book Prophetic Culture: Recreation for Adolescents (2021), Federico Campagna uses the figure of the adolescent to symbolise a state of openness and creative potential, highlighting the tension between the desire for structure and the fear of limiting possibilities. This duality reflects a broader cultural and philosophical exploration of how new worlds and meanings can emerge from the ruins of old ones. In 1987, Cumbernauld used the adolescent, a “new generation” precociously suited, as emblem of civic optimism, as hope for a future. Now, Shannon remakes this image to bridge the mood of the time with the mood of today. 

Referential and edged, at times, with a deadpan, colloquial humour, Shannon’s cover versions reanimate materials and sites of the past – social gatherings, state-commissioned murals, municipal documents, remnants of provincial music cultures – while questioning how time, memory, and place are flattened in both literal and imaginary ways in an era of digital immediacy. “Cosmologically assuming this is the end of a world (Cumbernauld) and, more broadly, of our world,” Shannon writes, “taking cue from Bifo Berardi; propagating re-engagement with shared psychological energy feels like the only ethical escape window left”. The objects and images cited, once part of a collective civic imagination and personal lexicon of daily life, are now ghost traces, residue of time that cling to the psychosphere. DEVOCORPOSTO (a title playing on Development Corporation or portmanteau high school Italian for MUST-BODY-PLACE/AFTER ) takes the death of the new town as allegory of failure, as locus for personal and collective memory, as index of displacement, of evolution, ‘de-evolution’ and the undoing of linear time; a twilight zone between real history and half-forgotten futures. “When your concrete reality is reduced to toxic dust”, says the artist, “in the end, what’s left is what sticks: the psychic sludge of a place and set of ideals once dreamt, destroyed by capital and market forces, now imploding into the landfill of time, to be re-developed into a new shopping mall.