A short essay commissioned for an ongoing series of publications on new work shown at Street Level Gallery, Glasgow. 'Multi-Story' was exhibited in February 2005.

Migration, especially economic migration, has been a constant feature of human history. It isn't so very long ago that masses of economic, political, cultural and religious migrants left their homeland and flooded into lands across the world. These were Scots looking for a better life than the one into which they had been born. They had been oppressed, imprisoned, starved and forced out of their homes. They had no alternative but to migrate in their thousands elsewhere - anywhere that they could find, anywhere that would take them.

When Glasgow City Council accepted a contract with the government to house refugees and asylum seekers it made sense in a number of respects. The city had a lot of empty flats in its tower block housing stock and it made economic sense to have them occupied. Empty flats means falling school roles and the closure of shops. Also history shows us that, in the long run, migrants contribute real benefits to the host country. Witness, for example, the explosive educational success of the children of South East Asian parents in the USA.

Glasgow's legendary 'friendliness' and its compassion for oppressed people was significantly demonstrated when it became the first city in the world to name a street after Nelson Mandela while he was still a prisoner on Robben Island. Many cities followed that lead but it was to Glasgow that Mandela came to thank the cities of the world for their gestures of support and solidarity. Glasgow's gesture possibly still remains unique since the street chosen to be named, Nelson Mandela Place, housed the offices of the apartheid South African Government.

From the sixties many artists, for democratic reasons and fuelled by the post war consensus, moved into a more directly engaged social art practice. They saw it as a way of involving broad swathes of people in the arts who, through economic, social educational and cultural reasons, were excluded from playing a full role in society. The work offered one way of liberating people from that very exclusion. It was natural therefore that artists and arts organisations with a commitment to social art practice should turn their attentions to the urgent needs of this sudden influx of asylum seekers suffering exclusion in an extreme form. Street Level, through its outreach and educational programmes has established a substantial track record in social art practices. In this respect, with its special emphasis on photography and the evolving computer technologies, it is well-placed to engage in such work.