Various
venues, Edinburgh
Four
stars
How did
we allow this to happen? This is the question asked by historian William
Dalrymple regarding the UK’s impending departure from Europe in his
contribution to this six installation city-wide series of love letters to the
continent which 62 per cent of Scotland’s voters chose to remain part of. Commissioned
by Edinburgh’s Hogmanay and Edinburgh International Book Festival, and running
from dusk to late evening from now until Burns Night, this is resistance in
monumental fashion.
Dalrymple’s
rich evocation of the two-way traffic between Scotland and the rest of Europe is
writ large on the wall of the Tron Kirk, where a window on the world is brought
to life by Double Take productions as a simmering score by RJ McConnell
threatens to explode. The umbilical connections between nations are rolled back
even further to ancient times atop Calton Hill. Here, Kapka Kassabova’s words
declare how ‘migration is our inheritance’ as shimmering animations by Bright
Side Studios flit across the pillars of the National Monument and the keening
chorales of Pippa Murphy’s score pierce the night air.
Other
writers give more personal reflections. At Leith Library. William Letford’s reminiscences
sees artist James Houston projecting each word with the same staccato rhythm as
they might be delivered orally. At Custom House, Chitra Ramaswamy looks back to
childhood holidays across continents, with Daniel Warren’s accompanying film
reflected onto the Water of Leith in a way that ebbs and flows with similar
freedom of movement. At the already futuristic looking Tech Cube beside
Summerhall, Louise Welsh explores the international language of words
themselves, Emlyn Firth’s restless typography contracting and expanding like
the seismic jigsaw it illustrates.
It is
Stef Smith’s moving short story that lingers the most, as it charts love’s
first fever to its plague and the agonies of loss that go with it. Shown at the
Cowgate entrance of the Bongo Club, which already resembles a tomb, Smith’s
words are both intimate
and heartbreaking. Accompanied
by Eleanor Meredith’s images of washed-up pebbles and MJ McCarthy’s yearning
string-led score, there’s
a greater metaphor at play here, however. This is about the devastating emptiness
a parting leaves on any level, and the need to fill it in the desperate shadows
of the unforeseen emptiness left behind.
The Herald, January 2nd 2019
ends
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