“For the way the city thinks, dare we darn without permission. Let us raise the questions about agency, about capacity, or imagine that the city is a mouth,”[1] writes the poet Rhona Warwick Paterson. Printed in red ink on bright orange paper, her words catch my eye on the front page of a newspaper entitled Remnants: How to reassemble a city, the second issue of a newspaper conceived by Voices of Experience and Panel on the occasion of this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival. Put together by the research collective Voices of Experience, which consists of the architects Suzanne Ewing, Jude Barber, and Nicola McLachlan, the newspaper gathers lived memories to ask how the city of Edinburgh might be read, re-stitched, and reimagined through its built environment.
Remnants echoes the central proposition of this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival: to treat the city itself as an archive where an assemblage of voices and memories resists flattering representational logics of hegemonic historical accounts. From 7 to 24 August 2025, the UK’s largest annual art festival invited its audience into a wide-ranging programme of exhibitions, performances, and events that explored how art can articulate experiences of political upheaval, social struggle, and environmental change.
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The Festival brought together works shaped by, and reflecting upon, vastly different historical, geopolitical, cultural, and material conditions that all proved compelling, the ways in which different methodological impulses can-interpret and re-enact history in ways that move beyond dominating structures of remembrance. This convergence lent the Festival a critical coherence, positioning it not as a collection of isolated artistic gestures but as an active field that negotiates the construction of counter-archives, an unsettling of the centralization of authorized heritage, and the opening of new possibilities for historical imagination.
Assembled across tables and vitrines in the entrance hall of the EAF Pavilion, Ellis Jackson Kroese presented material from the ongoing research project Trans Masc Studies, an investigation into the often-overlooked histories of trans masculine lives in Scotland. Pride buttons sit alongside pulp novels and newspaper clippings, next to letters and records recounting the life of Walter Sholto Douglas in the early nineteenth century. An annotated rehearsal draft of Frances Poet’s play Adam anchors more recent cultural memory. Under the title Memory is a Museum, Kroese’s installation insists on the archival presence of queer lives in a past that is too often narrated as though they had never existed. By placing these traces in dialogue, the work unsettles the fiction of absence and demonstrates how acts of collecting and display can intervene in dominant modes of historical erasure.
Equipped with the red-ink Remnants newspaper and a folded festival map, I make my way on a sunny August weekend from the pavilion through the flood of tourists surging towards Edinburgh’s Old Town. The streets pulse with spectacle: street performers and musicians compete for attention at every corner, flyers for stand-up shows and cabaret are pressed insistently into my hands. Temporary stages emerge among historic sites and squares; performers’ amplified voices add a dense sonic layer surrounding the Fringe Festival, the city's unjuried theatre and performance program stretching across every conceivable surface of public life. In the midst of this spectacle of simultaneity, where sounds, masses, and commerce pull you into an overwhelming dramaturgy of saturation, Edinburgh Art Festival insists on another mode of attention. With its twenty-first edition, it redirects the visitor from the spectacle of the city towards more subtle details, gestures of listening, recollection, and encounter. Rather than adding to the sheer volume of Edinburgh’s festival season, it builds on quiet infrastructures: spaces where oral histories and counter-histories can emerge, and where the city is not consumed as a stage set but inhabited as an archive.
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One such site is the People’s Story Museum, which is housed in the historic Canongate Tolbooth, once an administrative and judicial building on the edge of Edinburgh’s Old Town. Dedicated to narrating the history of the city’s working class from the early eighteenth century to the present, the museum also holds the UK’s largest collection of early reform flags and banners. On my quest for Hamish Halley’s newly commissioned video work, I find myself distracted by the museum’s displays which vary from informative to obscure demonstrations of trade union histories to documentations of early working-class life in Scotland. Life-sized puppets—arranged in dimly lit dioramas that attempt to depict authentic representations of workers—produce an almost uncanny atmosphere that wavers between historical education and stagecraft.
Halley’s video work please keep (2025), screened in the attic of the museum, brings together intimate footage from the clearing out his grandparents’ house after their passing with archival material from Perth Museum, filmed before its collection was relocated to a new site. Installed in a space where remnants of earlier exhibitions lie stacked beside the projection, the work establishes a dialogue between authorised and personal archives. In doing so, it raises the question of what forms of knowledge, memory, and intention are embedded in the ways we conserve, store, and display objects, and how they shape the epistemologies connected to them. As much as the museum impacts the viewing experience of please keep, Halley’s work may resonate in the way I read the museum itself. It speaks to the difficulty of freezing lived experience in representation and emphasizes the fragile continuity between spaces of labor, family, and protest.
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At Talbot Rice Gallery, a partner institution of the Edinburgh Art Festival, Wael Shawky’s Cabaret Crusade (2010-2014) series is shown alongside his most recent work, Drama 1882 (2024). The works are complemented by drawings, sculptural works, and archival documents from the University of Edinburgh. Renowned for his multilayered retellings of history, in which myth, memory, and historical record are treated as unstable, shifting registers, Shawky’s works function as re-enactments of contested pasts. In the Cabaret Crusade trilogy, the European invasion of Western Asia, initially under a papal mandate to liberate Jerusalem from Muslim rule, which took place between 1095 to the fall of the last Crusader Kingdom in 1291, is staged using handmade marionettes whose exaggerated features deliberately steer the narration away from visual realism. Shawky’s scripts animate both Christian and Muslim characters with the lyricism of classical Arabic. His own musical scores carry the stories, moving seamlessly between the realms of mythology and historical recounting. In Drama 1882 (2024), Shawky shifts to human actors, yet their gestures remain almost puppet-like, choreographed in a highly stylised, musical-cinematic tableau that situates a café scene in Alexandria within the broader context of British occupation of Egypt and geopolitical conflicts around the control of the Suez Canal. His performances destabilize the notion of a single authoritative history, revealing how archives, memory, and storytelling are inherently selective, partial, and contested. By blending meticulously researched detail with surreal puppetry and choreographed fiction, Shawky foregrounds the gaps, silences, and contradictions that conventional historical narratives obscure. The works compel the viewer to navigate multiple temporalities and perspectives simultaneously, raising questions not only about which versions of the past are privileged, but also about how the act of retelling itself (re)shapes understanding.
Shawky’s patterns of historical storytelling remain with me later that evening as I listen to the dense vocal layerings of Roxanne Tataei at Jupiter Rising Festival, staged as part of the Edinburgh Art Festival. Set on the grounds of Jupiter Artland, a sculpture park outside of the city, the night brought together poets, performers, and musicians to celebrate queer histories against the backdrop of the sculpture park’s scenery. On an open-air stage, Tataei built her performance through the looping of her own voice, thickening the sound with each added layer and harmonizing with echoes of her voice, which felt simultaneously intimate and monumental: a choral body conjured by a single performer. Drawing on Scottish Gaelic psalm singing, a tradition with which Tataei has previously engaged, the work unfolds entirely on the resonant interplay of her breath, vocal tone, and repetition, all without the presence of any other instruments.
In her layering of past and present, and singular and collective voices, Tataei’s performance not only gestured toward older, folkloric traditions. Her voice became an instrument of temporal folding, wherein echoes are not mere technical effects but become metaphors for history’s reverberations, thus enacting the core of EAF’s annual focus. Here, stillness and repetition do not signal stasis but rather the persistence of memory as it returns, shifts, and actualizes itself in the present. The way Tataei embodies histories with her voice resonates with how the festival approaches Edinburgh’s urban fabric—layered as it is with traces of labor struggles, and cultural and social resistance—as a living palimpsest, being constantly rewritten as time proceeds.
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- Footnotes
[1] Rhona Warwick Paterson, “How you Re-assemble a City,” in Voice of Experience, (Edinburgh Arts Festival, 2025), 1.
Images:
Cover: Wael Shawky, Cabaret Crusades III: The Secrets of Karbala, 2015, film still © Wael Shawky.
Fig. Remnants, Voices of Experience, 2025 © Theresa Zwerschke.
Fig.2 Ellis Jackson Kroese, Trans Masc Studies: Memory is a Museum, 2025, installation view © Theresa Zwerschke.
Fig.3 Hamish Halley, please keep, 2025, film still © Hamish Halley.
