Sian Sullivan was one of the speakers at the Clyde Reflections seminar at Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art last month. She just published this blog further articulating her own thoughts on Stephen Hurrel and Ruth Brennan’s film – an exemplary art science collaboration.
‘Clyde Reflections’ installed at the Glasgow gallery of Modern Art, June 2015.
One evening in May 2015 I started to read Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs and European Renegadoes (2003(1995)) 
by Peter Lamborn Wilson, a writer whose ruminations on ‘ontological anarchy’, under the pseudonym Hakim Bey, have inspired me for years.
Pirate Utopias opens with a chapter called ‘Pirate and Mermaid’, based on a legendary pirate known as Lass el-Behar from the town Rabat, which faces out towards the Atlantic Ocean on the coast of Morocco. Here el-Behar built a white tower – the Torre Blanquilla, ‘in order to hide his treasure within its walls’ (p.7). Wilson writes that:
Lass el-Behar was young, handsome and brave. Many a captive Christian woman fell deeply in love with him, as did the daughters of rich and powerful Mohammedans. But … above all it was the sea he loved; he loved her with…
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