SINCE the early 1980s and Test Dept, Angus Farquhar’s work has been founded in collective action, and large-scale community projects. What is it that makes people act collectively?

“There has to be a good idea,” he replies. “It has to be something that sparks each person individually, so that they can give of themselves without losing part of themselves.”

The work started in protest against Thatcher. “But,” says Farquhar, “we were always on the losing side, in solidarity with the miners’ strike, the ambulance workers’ strike, the print workers’ strike. I was very involved with those at the time. It was very black and white.”

After the oppositional art of the ’80s, Farquhar found himself taking another line. He founded the Beltane Fire Festival in Edinburgh, now in its 36th annual iteration, as a way of encouraging community, but without a specific political focus.

“Beltane was an antidote to the greyness that came out of the political battles with Thatcher. It came from an anarchic spirit: the idea that people can come together in a way that can’t be touched. I mean: the politicians would even know how to react to it. It’s the idea that you can create something that is your own, where you can feel your own strength as a group. It was a sideways step from direct political action, but it was a chosen one.”

Was that an admission of defeat?

“I wanted to create other forms,” he says. “Being involved in those struggles changed you and changed your relationships. The mining families and mining communities we worked with are still friends, and friends for life. The most surprising groups of people came together — like when we worked with South Wales Striking Miners Choir — and these highly creative, highly unusual relationships can’t be destroyed even given the greater destruction of the mines and working conditions and all that happened. 

“Those were the positives we took out of it. The human dignity of those who grew through the act of struggle and changed their outlook on life.”

But hard times also bring opportunities. Locating his work firmly in his hometown of Glasgow — where local authorities are bankrupt — there’s suddenly a chance for artists to “step into the cracks.”

“Sometimes, in these cicumstances, there’s a little more openness to change. There’s more room to do things that can be meaningful. Art can, perhaps, have a stronger function.”

His interest in environmental work had lead to garden projects, such as the Hidden Gardens at Tramway, and finally to the current project which he calls a “Memorial To The Unremembered.”

Having trained as a humanist celebrant, Farquhar sees the act of planting seeds as nurturing a collective appreciation of the meaning of death, and points out that people respond because: “they like the idea because they know that in this country we‘re not good at communicating with the dead. 

“It’s part of an overall project called Glasgow Requiem, which is about how we see, and feel, and live with the past. And it doesn’t take much to see the connection to the present; the migrant routes in to Europe. There are thousands of white stones — unmarked graves — that mark that route through the Balkans, Turkey, Greece and Italy. It is the same story. 

“And there is the ceaseless bombardment and murder of innocent people in Gaza. What can you do? 

“What you can do is to be sensitised. Sensitised to what is going on, and what you can do to support those who face that on a daily and nightly basis. That is where this work is situated.”

It follows a familiar pattern: Farquhar finds himself drawn to groups of local activists, and then to helping them to realise a bigger plan. In this case, the Friends of Glasgow Royal Infirmary invited him to explore an area of the city where entire communities have been displaced and forgotten. And then he met the custodians of the infirmary’s neighbour, the Friends of Glasgow Necropolis.

Here, the new project is situated.

It’s a monumental garden cemetery where the great and good of the 19th century created memorials, either paid for by themselves or by subscription, and the more money you had the bigger sculpture you got and higher up the hill you went, all the way up to John Knox at the top. “Knox’s monument was raised by 300 early Protestant capitalists,” says Farquhar, “and the bulk of that money, as we now know, came from the North Atlantic slave trade and plantations. So this cemetery is a beacon to the bigoted godfather of capitalism!”

But what struck him from research into the cemetery was that of the 55,000 people buried there, 21,000 were “common graves,” or “common grave areas” where people were buried without a headstone. These people had little visibility in life and even greater invisibility in death.

“But that is the reality of how cities are built. Cities are built by mass migration — poor people coming in and often working in abject conditions. In real, grinding poverty.”

He found one particular section in which 8,000 people are buried and, while some borders had been planted, what Farquhar has done is to make something “more formal, and more intense in terms of scale.”

The project has a physical design, developed with Scouse Flowerhouse and Richard Scott, who runs the National Wildflower Centre in Eden in Cornwall, “a remarkable environmental activist.” The basic unit of the action will be wildflower seed that has been grown and harvested in Cornwall, and then handed as seedbags to volunteers. 

The project also has a social and a performative side: working with Anniesland College and their ESOL programme for foreign students, some of the participants are “unaccompanied young adults who have come from all parts of the world, often through quite traumatic backgrounds” and a group with learning disabilities. And alongside them is the Scottish folksinger Karine Polwart who wrote a song for the occasion to sing to those beneath the earth.

“I always like to do it with music,” says Farquhar. “I do it with food. It’s always free. It’s about taking part, and sharing food afterwards. It should feel like a gift, not a performance. It’s made by our presence, our being there together.”

The Necropolis planting will take place on the May 11 and 12, at 1pm on each day. For more information, see: aproxima.co.uk