The future of the Keiller Centre should be in the hands of Dundonians, according to city creative organisation NEoN Digital Arts.
And NEoN director Donna Holford-Lovell is working to find out what Dundee’s citizens see for the future of the run-down building, with the help of the centre’s Federation art gallery.
A bright new exhibition in the gallery invites people to share their memories of the ‘old’ Keiller Centre, as well as have their say on what they’d most like to see in its future.
Options include a ‘Night Market’ (international street food stalls, operating late in the evening), a ‘Recycle and Repair Station’ (for electrical products, cables, and other easily repaired items), coworking space and even an arcade.
Importantly, Donna explains, the project is about exploring options for the centre that aren’t just big-name shops and long-term leases.
“We’ve all got too much stuff and we’re all realising we’ve got too much stuff,” she says.
“There’s a race to be sustainable, to be environmentally friendly, to be caring, and I think the high street could do that.
“I just think communities need to take their space back. So we’re giving the people a chance to answer the question: ‘What do you want?’”
‘What’re you doing in my Keiller Centre?’
As well as the suggested options, which are presented on a vibrant wall display where people can vote on them using colourful dot stickers, the exhibition is encouraging visitors to suggest their own ideas using the ‘Future’ ball run.
“You load the ball run with your ideas for the future and play the game,” explains Federation gallery director Kathryn Rattray, who last year announced her mission to ‘make the Keiller Centre great again’.
“We collect all the ideas for the future into the ball bucket. We then open them up and seeing what people are saying, seeing what people’s ideas are.
“We’ll collect all this data at the end of it and try to make sense of what Dundee wants and needs, and how we can utilise the Keiller Centre space better.”
The exhibition opened yesterday and will run until Saturday March 4.
After it concludes, Donna and her team will take their findings to the city council and centre management, with whom they developed strong working relationships.
And eventually, she hopes, the centre could be owned and run by a community trust. But to do that, she says, “we need a big enough community”.
So she’s encouraging as many Dundonians as possible to visit the exhibition and have their say on the future of “their Keiller Centre”.
“I actually think the public already feel ownership of this building, because it’s theirs,” she says.
“So they feel very confident about coming in and saying: ‘What’re you doing in my Keiller Centre?’
“That’s what we want.”
Conversation