The contradictions inherent in the system are everywhere at the Calton Hill home of Edinburgh’s Collective Gallery just now. As gentrification encroaches the landscape, the gallery’s three Edinburgh Art Festival shows turn received historical narratives on their head to reveal more ambiguous readings of the past. Outside, visitors are greeted by ‘Silent Agitator’ (2019), a giant clock made by Ruth Ewan bearing the words ‘TIME TO ORGANISE’. This monumental call to arms is based on an illustration by American writer and activist Ralph Chaplin for the Industrial Workers of the World labour union, and is a companion piece to ‘The Beast’ (2022), a newly commissioned twelve-minute animated film penned by Ewan with socialist magician Ian Saville. Animated by Regina Ohak with Duncan Marquiss, and with music and sound design by Ross Downes, the film depicts nineteenth century industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, forced to engage in dialectical discourse with Diplodocus carnegi
A bare-chested man poses with a football tied on his head with the sort of scarf that might have been sported by the daughters in Lorca’s play, The House of Bernarda Alba, on one of their sunnier days. This is ‘Immigrante’ (2022), in which El Salvador born Jose Campos, in his guise of Studio Lenca, strikes a pose. In ‘El Historiante Blanco’ (2019), Campos stares defiantly at the camera from the next wall, a sword-wielding warrior clad in armour made, not of metal and mesh, but flowers and lace, in a fancy dress subversion of machismo. These are two of Los Historiantes (2019), in which Campos dons the dressing-up-box apparel of characters depicted by his country’s folkloric storytelling dancers, who hand down tales of colonialism and subjugation of their Indigenous people. As an émigré fleeing his war-torn country, first to America, now to the UK, where he is officially classed as ‘Other’, Campos reimagines these various identities in flamboyantly theatrical fashion. The two