Month: March 2024

Community Walking Projects, Walking without a donkey - travels in Edinburgh

Terminalia ’24

‘Go Slow … Time After Time’

A community walk from the Granton:hub, Madelvic House w3w: wished.visit.silver

Captions for the images above: Left – The group, some from inside, some outside the Granton Boundary; Right – The group, checking out the wrapped-up Granton Gasholder, building site for new housing

At the edges of pavements, the walls of dilapidated buildings, the join between the land and the sea, and between homed and homeless, we wandered to mark the Festival of Terminalia on 23 February 2024.

Maps annotated by group members

We walked a route familiar to some and unfamiliar to others, according to a path previously visited 4 months earlier in order to make comparisons. Mapping as we went, we strayed off that path occasionally, moved across the boundary several times when the sea or a plant drew us, and noted changes wrought in the natural and urban landscape over such a short time.

Captions for above photos: Left – Electric Car Factory. Planning permission has been gained for housing. Middle – Where Granton Harbour meets the Brick (Granton or Royston) Beach at the Western Breakwater. Right – Sheila and Margaret.

Leaving the Granton:hub / Madelvic House, we started off through the wasteland area behind, past the old Electric Car Factory which was, unusually, open. We passed the travellers’ community who were building a big fire of tyres and other rubbish; the caravans housing the community which has found its way here in 1s and 2s over the last 5 years (maybe), surrounded by dismembered trees; a couple of renegade trailers where men were working – one a local barber who was known to one of our party so we stopped for a chat – between fences newly erected and ground scraped clear of its soil.

Nat pointed out the copse of silver birch which have been cordoned off for keeping, the result of our extensive lobbying of the developers. Here, an art repository is planned by the National Galleries of Scotland, way down the line. It was also the site of our community orchard (at the Tor), once upon a time.

Captions for above photos: Wasteland area behind Madelvic House where people and more-than-humans live, soon to be developed into an Arts Centre

We skirted ‘The Rabbit Run’ closely bordered by towering new blocks and also threatened to be raised to the ground, and turned down towards the sea along Waterfront Avenue – created, named and planned to be this wide, so we are told, to accommodate the trams, though there is, thankfully, no sign of them as yet.

Waterfront Avenue
Rabbit Run

Stories were told as we hovered at the corner: of the swift boxes often erected on lamp posts next to the Swift business sign (coincidence); of Jenny’s tenacity – spending an officially homeless year visiting the housing association and getting to know them until she was allocated an apartment in the community ahead of us; and of the day we planted the orchard (from up the road) on the grassy bank by more newbies to the area, The Pianodrome.

“With the dog, we went to the rabbit run, behind that Beech Hedge; I know it will all dramatically change very soon.”

Nat

Captions for above photos: Left – Swift poster, Middle – Where Jenny lives now (before the block was built). Right – The new orchard at The Pianodrome

Now we were on the far northern boundary of both Edinburgh as a whole and Granton, whose territory we were beating the bounds of. Many of us bemoaned the lack of access to the Brick Beach, but then a desire path was spotted which turned out to be a thoroughfare. Jubilation!

“for a while I’ve not been able to get through (the wasteland between West Shore Rd and the sea / brick beach) That’s been irritating, having that little cut through blocked off. That used to be on my route so I could get a seat and watch the sea for a while, undisturbed. Tonight we were able to walk through for the first time in ages.”

Kev

The day was at its evening cusp and it was darkling, so we continued along West Harbour Road which becomes West Shore Road, past the new-to-the-area Edinburgh Palette (what we hope will be new artist studios and home for a weekend Street festival), and turned left onto the Speirs Bruce Way (more stories of Antarctic adventures and explorers are linked to this place). We went hard by what’s left of Granton Castle where the Walled Garden is hidden (a citizen success story as it was saved from developers and now houses countless allotments, natural dye- and community soup-makers), with the Social Bite village opposite.

Captions for photos above: Two A-Z maps of Granton – 2004 on the left showing one gas holder, and 1999 on the right showing three as there used to be

I’m new to the area and walking is a way of feeling the local, recent history

Jenny

Uphill we traipsed, viewing the space for the new Granton Mural (end March 2024) and regaining the Gasholder. We stood in the rain to wonder why Caroline Park Avenue has become Waterfront Broadway, and returned to our starting point just as the fire engine arrived to douse the fire, now emitting acrid black smoke.

We’re from slightly outside the area. I’ve been down here a LOT walking the dogs so it’s very familiar, but it’s interesting to do it in a group because different people see different things. [Did you notice the changes?] Oh definitely.

Sheila

Toasting with a libation (warm apple juice), as is customary at this Festival, we swapped experiences, hopes and fears. Our discussion focused on the place where the inner landscape met the outer.

I used to like going there because of the nature around the gasworks. Because there was such a high fence and nobody could get in, it was undisturbed and there were wild orchids. To see it all demolished and a building site … it’s sad.

Maria

Along the bread line, the coast line, and the invisible lines between here and there, and us and other, we walked. It’s a time of great change in this area: trees taken down, blocks of flats going up, buildings repurposed and roads renamed (no-one knows why, though we suspect so-called ‘gentrification’).

The fire engine arrives just as we return to Madelvic House

You May also like (links)

Festival of Terminalia Community Walk 2024

Walking the Line Terminalia 2023

Granton Boundary Walk 2023 started on the Festival of Terminalia

Absent Trees of Granton

Festival of Terminalia 2021

© All photos my own

Other

Mal Pelo, Bosc Tancat

The Bluebird Call by Mal Pelo at Bòlit, Centre d’Art Contemporani, Girona. In two parts: Bosc Tancat (‘Dense/Enclosed Forest’) in Bòlit_LaRambla, and Taller-Memòria in Bòlit_PouRodó.

“If the main driving force of our dynamic is walking then that of our identity is asking questions.”

Mal Pelo

In this video-art-light installation at the Bólit, Centre d’Art Contemporani in Girona, tall, straight tree trunks are suspended. Hanging off the ground without roots, they exist in an other-worldly, ghostly light in front of a large screen showing a black and white film. On that screen, people swarm slowly, alone and blank-faced, in step with each other. They walk rhythmically, turning at random intervals, sometimes in concert with others in the group. They walk and walk.

Based on a poem, Separation, by art critic, painter and writer, John Berger, the company state that the work is “about the ambivalence of the individual and the community”. Using the medium of contemporary dance in the broadest understanding of that word, and highly respected within the artistic community (they were directorial collaborators in the extraordinary Falaise by company, Baro d’evel, for example), Mal Pelo are the artistic co-directors, dancers and choreographers Maria Muñoz and Pep Ramis based in Girona.

Their film is set in bleak forests and abandoned industrial and rural wastelands where an assembly of overcoated, beanie-hatted people walk together. With arms swinging naturally or hands in pockets, they carry nothing, though we see them sharing sliced bread, offering it to each other when they make a meal stop. In Separation, Berger writes, “… in our hearts we carry everything …”.

Afterwards, they wind between trees, something we must do to get to one of the two chairs which invite us to sit and watch. There’s a sense these humans — for there is a homogeneity about them — are searching, and yet they seem aimless. Are they a tribe? An extended family? They wander individually, collect for a moment like a flock of ground-based birds arcing en masse, still moving, before separating again.

Stylistically, the collaborative choreography is reminiscent of the early pedestrian experiments of the Judson Dance Theater in the New York lofts of the ‘60s, harking back to the very early work of Simone Forti, Steve Paxton and Yvonne Rainer. This work marked an important departure from the dark auditoria, proscenium-arch theatres, in which dance had almost exclusively existe

d before that, to more quotidian spaces, to the studios and pavements of America. The participants often had no training, they were ‘ordinary’ people who were simply interested and willing to experiment. There was an anarchic spirit about the period.

The filming in Bosc Tancat is often from above, inverting our ground-based habit of looking up to see a skein of geese flying in formation, our normal way of seeing. At other times, the walkers move directly at the camera, passing by without acknowledging it. Walking away from us without pausing, they continue to walk as if forever, pacing without stopping. Are they in harmony? Are they moving away from home or life or land, or towards it?

The haunting, instrumental score in Dense Forest by Fanny Thollot, is interspersed with Berger’s poem, gently spoken. There are occasional silences, too, as if the wind has momentarily ceased though the movement is ever onwards.

Sitting amongst the ‘Dense Forest’ close up to the wall which is filled with this film, I am carried along the paths with the chorale, as if lacking a sense of autonomy. I feel as if I am slowly floating and looking down even when the lens is not, my wings outstretched, my seeing and hearing alert, but when the company eventually come to the end, it is at an edge. They collect at the top of a cliff, a vista ahead of them and there they sit with their backs to me, still, at last, and I am left, melancholy.

I am suddenly taken back to two occasions when I have witnessed single men walking along train tracks with no luggage. Once, in 2018 in north eastern Greece not far from the Turkish border, I was in a car witnessing through the window as we passed him walking into the distance. The other time was just last week in Cataluña when I stood on a bridge and looked over and down watching this tiny figure recede.

The actions, the behaviour of the performers in the carefully chosen landscapes of Bosc Tancat have a timelessness and as I leave I feel a deep connection to them.

© All photos are by the author