The mysterious charity saving The Skinny

“I can’t complain. It is free after all.” Stina Aldén pauses and glances around. To her right is a leaking yellow pipe being redirected into a bucket. Pasted on the wall behind them are worn-out whiteboards with long-abandoned sales targets. Aldén's photography is piled at their feet. The space is technically a studio, but really it’s an empty office that’s seen better days.

“I suppose that’s what makes it exploitative, isn’t it?” they finish, laughing uncertainly. “Because it’s free I feel like I can’t say anything bad about it”. 

We’re sitting inside a huge former office at the Skypark complex in Finnieston — a once-futuristic glass fortress built in 2006 and formerly one of Glasgow’s most valuable pieces of commercial real estate. Previously home to Three Mobile, the office looks like it’s awaiting its next sales meeting, only now the carpet is tired, the walls are scuffed and artists have taken over spaces where once would have sat rows of desks. 

They’re here because of Outer Spaces, the “artist development organisation” which is about to become one of Scotland’s most important culture charities. In September, it announced that it is pulling culture magazine The Skinny back from the brink by buying its parent company, Radge Media, which was facing liquidation. But for those who use Outer Spaces, its role of providing free studios for artists isn’t quite so simple — that’s because, by doing so, it saves corporate landlords millions.

For Aldén, Skypark is somewhere they can make art outside of their bedroom without forking out for costly studio space. A lifeline. For other artists, it’s a dangerous, unsettling space that “exists to ensure big businesses get tax breaks”. 

For all the artists we’ve spoken to for this piece, Outer Spaces is a mystery, with no one quite sure who’s behind it or what it really does. With negotiations for its takeover of The Skinny ongoing, Outer Spaces is poised to become one of Scotland’s key cultural charities. So what is it? And, what’s this about a funding model that benefits a trillion-dollar property manager at the expense of the public purse?

Hi, thanks for reading. I’m Beth, and I’m probably the last person who should be writing about the arts.

I don’t own a turtle-neck, I don’t know what half the terminology means, and yet here I am, poking around Glasgow’s arts scene. But I do know about people, money, how to get to the bottom of a story. So, with the help of an amazing freelancer (who has much more of a clue than I do) we've written about what’s going on at Outer Spaces, and you can read it as part of a Bell membership.

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