I am happy to say that I am on my way to Camallera near Girona in Cataluña / Catalonia, where I am taking up an Artist’s Residency at Nau Côclea (Centre de Creació Contemporània Nau Côchlea).
I will be walking around the edge of the town, the boundary of the area, listening to the sounds of the place, and to ‘stories’ from the soil. When I make a Sound Walk, I follow the signs. I take notice of what happens around me when I am in the research and preparation stage.
I had been reading about the current interest in engaging with the legacy of Francisco Franco’s authoritarian regime, and consequent human suffering. The suppression of democratic freedom and the Catalan language had far-reaching results. I have studied The Historical Memory Law, followed the opening of some Civil War mass graves, spoken with people about inherited grief, and noted the rituals being enacted around the acknowledgement of the loss on many levels.
When I discovered that my visit corresponds with the annual walk across the Pyrénées from France in memory of Walter Benjamin, I knew I must join it. Benjamin was directed across the mountains by Lisa Fittko and received bad news on arrival in Port Bou on the Spanish side. He died by suicide that night, before being able to finally escape to the United States.
This level of inter-generational trauma takes time, so much time, to leave the gene pool. It surges through bloodlines … How to tell a new story of resilience and hope? Is this history of loss held in the soil?… How can we honour the suffering of our ancestors – of those who came before us – but still try to unravel the chains we find ourselves bound by? Is the answer held within the very soil… Is the answer held in the residue the ghosts leave behind?
Kerri ni Dochartaigh Thin Places p186
I come to this residency with many years of embodied study of death, grief and loss – personally, and through my Shiatsu work, death cafes, and writing. This coincidence, then, came as no surprise. I know that the Sound Walk that I will be making during my residency may concern grief, loss and renewal as a result, although I won’t know until I begin.
If you are interested in this project and able to come between 20 November and 2 December, I am inviting you to join me for one day or part of one day, to walk and listen, to share your feelings. We will co-create a Sound Walk from these experiences which will then live on in Camallera for anyone to join at a later date.
Dates: 20 November and 2 December. There is one bed for you to stay a night in the artist’s cottage. Let me know if you are interested! tamsinlgrainger@gmail.com
Festivities and DelegatesEl Grand Tour Grave, Cataluña
This is a map showing the locations of three soundwalks in Edinburgh EH5 by Tamsin Grainger: ‘The Wall’ and ‘No Birds Land’ were both shortlisted for Sound Walk September awards (walklistencreate.org). Is There a Place for REVOlution or Peace and Biscuits was a 4WCoP23 event. Detailed information can be found on the links below, together with Soundcloud and Vimeo connections.
Whilst ‘No Birds Land’ and ‘Is There a Place for REVOlution or Peace and Biscuits’ have recently been renewed and mended with new pennants, I’m sorry to say that ‘The Wall’ installation has become ragged from the weather and time. You can still walk along the wall / Western Breakwater of Granton Harbour and listen to the Sound Walk on your phone, but you will need to access it either before you leave home or from here if you have sufficient data, as there is no QR code currently at the site. Links to ‘No Birds Land’ and ‘Is There a Place for REVOlution or Peace and Biscuits’ are below.
My sound walks are site-specific sound/art installations with QR codes for you to listen to on your phone as you are walking through the tunnels or along the wall on the Western Breakwater of Granton Harbour.
A sound walk and installation made in a tunnel for ‘Watch This Space’ #4WCoP23 September 2023 using graffiti by North Edinburgh artists and local history. Listen here.
Hand stitched pennants in the Ferry Road Tunnel on the Chancelot Path. Is There a Place for REVOlution? or Peace and Biscuits
Location
‘Is There a Place for REVOlution? or Peace and Biscuits’ is a site-specific Sound Walk and Art Installation on the Chancelot cycle path under Ferry Road in Edinburgh. It is on Google Maps and the location using What3Words is ///fallen.reach.bottle
You can use your phone to activate the QR code and listen while you walk through the tunnel. You can also listen at home (without the full effect).
Understanding the text
The text of this Sound Walk uses other people’s sprayed graffiti words, so it sometimes sounds like nonsense. In it, I am playing with the found text, trying to make sense of it. Sometimes I read the words (like ABDO or REVO) from left to right (as English) and sometimes from right to left (as Arabic), highlighting the effort we often have to make to understand each other, and how important it is that we do. Because this is a sort of creative prose or poetry, I also make up my own words to fit in with the letters I find.
Sound Walk topics include:
Local history
Communication between us (reading and language)
How to keep yourself going when everything seems bleak
How the Red Line has been used in activism, in this and other countries
The capitalist system and whether it helps us
Slowing down and noticing nature; using wall- or street-wisdom
Site-specific Art Installation
You will find hand stitched pennants looped on a red line on one side of the tunnel. The string of triangular flags are hanging from old metal hooks which were originally used for cable and wires when this cycle path (or greenway) was a railway. The images and found text are from the walls and surfaces around North Edinburgh.
#4WCoP23 Is There a Place for REVOlution? or Peace and Biscuits
“AET REY NOOD Do you recognise this language? DAERB REY TAE. Can an internet app translate it? It’s ABout DOing / Or Don’t Be And (face the consequences).” This is text from the new Sound Walk. For clues, see the images below.
Doon Yer Tea, graffiti on the North Edinburgh cycle paths. Is There a Place for REVOlution? or Peace and Biscuits
I’m playing with words, making my own acronyms which are inspired by the found text. For example, ABDO (reading from left to right and back again from right to left etc) becomes: “And Between Doing Or Don’t Be. Anyway, By Doing Otherwise, Deciding to Be And Bide, Doesn’t Our Doing Become……A Beautiful Door Opening. Or Don’t Butterflies Ascend?” Am I speaking in riddles? I hope I haven’t lost you.
ABDO, graffiti in the Ferry Road Tunnel of the Chancelot Path. Is There a Place for REVOlution? or Peace and Biscuits
Is There a Place for REVOlution or Peace and Biscuits mini-videoREVO and BISTO, two of the most familiar ‘words’ of graffiti found in the Ferry Road tunnel of the Chancelot Path. Is There a Place for REVOlution? ABDO (reading from right to left: ODBA) is a character in Egyptian writer, Deena Mohammed’s Your Wish is my Command, a graphic novel. Is There a Place for REVOlution? or Peace and Biscuits
Using found words / graffiti that spoke to me
Unless you people see signs and wonders you will never believe
80% of ocean life is dead
Many
Deaths
Lives Matter
Unfuck the system
Fight
REVOlution, Revolt, Revoke
Part of the Peace and Biscuits sound walk script
Postcard made for the 4th World Congress of Psychogeography 2023. Is There a Place for REVOlution? or Peace and Biscuits
In this soundwalk, there’s some local history, activism and suggestions for when you are in a dark tunnel and cannot see the light at the end, the way out. There’s a film here on Vimeo that gives you a (silent) idea of the walk.
Walking across the Red Line . The Red Line is a symbol that a line has been reached and should not be crossed. An example of this would be the amount of carbon emitted into into our atmosphere. Is There a Place for REVOlution? or Peace and Biscuits
“I often use Street Wisdom if I need to get an insight on a situation or a problem. Once I’m tuned up, I’II hold the issue and just walk with that in mind and body, and see what happens. (It’s basically a shorthand way of doing the Quest: “Streets, show me some options with all this!”) Something often, if not I j. The other day I was full of different stresses, and the streets shared with me all kinds of patterns that seemed interconnected. I interpreted that insight as “Everything’s connected” (it’s nice to reduce the insight to 2 or 3 words). And that really helped!
Local graffiti Edinburgh. Is There a Place for REVOlution? or Peace and BiscuitsHand stitched pennant. Is There a Place for REVOlution? or Peace and Biscuits
With MANY thanks to Alba Bersolí (film maker ‘El día que volaron la montaña’ (When the Mountain Rumbles shown at the Catalan Film Festival in Edinburgh 2023 on Instagram @albabresolí ) for lending me her laptop and teaching me some Premiere Pro, going above and beyond to support me, and being an all-round wonderful woman.
New pennants (August 2025)
Notes
‘Your Wish is my Command’ is a graphic novel by Deena Mohamed reviewed here in the Guardian newspaper. There is a charcter called Abdo in it. ABDO is a word graffitied on the wall of the Ferry Road tunnel on the Chancelot Path where my Sound Walk is located.
A maze of pathways scored into the hillside Stories, only half-hidden Of children severed from Spain, England, Western Macedonia. Women walk the whitening circle of remembrance. Marble slabs lie aslant.
The First Friday Walk is a Walking the Land artist collective monthly event. The brief for July 2023 was from Amanda Steer @adamandadraws ; the theme of the walk was our tracks and the traces we leave in the landscape.
Kel Portman and I walked together through the village, up and along to the cemetery.
Cemetery Psarades, Greece
On the evening of the FFW, Soazic Guezennzec invited us to listen to the memories of older people living in the area, and Alexandra spoke movingly about her sisters and brothers who were evacuated from the village (200 young children) in 1948 when she was a baby.
Alexandra and Soazic, Psarades, Greece
The next morning (8 July), I participated in a pilgrimage organised by Jenny Staff (see The Roll of Emplacement) in which seven women collectively walked over 19,000 steps in a circle in the town square. Each carried a stick which had white chalk on its end which drew on the ground.
Invisible to Visible by Jenny Staff, Psarades, Greece
Walking Like a Tortoise around the Granton boundary
This project started with a collective walk on the Festival of Terminalia on 23 Feb 2023. It was followed by further solo and group walks and became the Walking Like a Tortoise project, which incorporated mixed media art exhibitions at Granton:hub (Edinburgh) on 29 September 2023 – 1 October 2023; Granton Station; Spilt Milk Gallery (online); and Edinburgh Central Library between 1 August – 30 September 2024. Community walking and workshops were a key part of this project and attracted a Creative Scotland / City of Edinburgh Council grant. Please also see this post for further artworks
Illustration from ‘On the Festival of Terminalia’ zine
Before
Granton is changing a lot and very quickly. My plan was to make a series of walks using different contemporary and historical maps to explore the edges of the place and document who and what I found there. I was interested to see where the area began and ended, and how it bordered on its neighbours. I was asking, Who or what is in and outside the boundary?
For the first walk, I set off in a clockwise direction, following the map I photographed at the National Galleries presentation of their new project, Art Works, at the Edinburgh College in June 2022:
turning right up Granton Rd and right again onto the cycle path
coming off at Pilton Drive, and walking westwards along Ferry Road
continuing down Crewe Rd North, back towards the sea
turning at the ‘new’ gas building by Caroline Park
making my way along Waterfront Ave to the harbour (I knew that access to the boundary had been cut off here and that the Western and Eastern Breakwaters were not connected by land but by the Firth of Forth rushing between them, so I had to take a detour)
along Wardie Bay beach
climbing up Wardie Steps to the post box
and completing the circle back at Granton View.
I met residents and visitors to Granton as I walked and had some interesting conversations about where they thought the boundary was. I asked permission to take their photo and keep some basic information about them (name, age country of origin if appropriate etc) explaining I might use it for an exhibition in the future.
The Tortoise
The title for this project comes from two sources. The first was a charming story I was told by my former neighbour, Betty, about how as a child she was handed a stow-away tortoise from the depths of an esparto grass boat that had put in to Granton Harbour at the bottom of our road. (Esparto grass was imported for the paper-making industry in the 1940s). The second is related to the Taoist practice of ‘walking leisurely like a tortoise’ which I and other T’ai Chi enthusiasts do as a mindful meditation. When we do that, something fascinating happens: we feel part of what’s around us and also separate; we are conscious of everything—the details as well as the bigger picture—and aware of our own feelings at the same time.
Cushion featuring the Granton Tortoise and the Granton Gasholder (embroidered) with Granton Harbour in the background
I practised a version of this slow walking around Granton as a counterbalance to the pace of life around me. It allowed me to meet other residents in a relaxed way, notice what lives here, and have time for reflection and reassessment, which is something that rushing does not.
“How much are we missing because we are constantly on the go….? When will we make space for our bodies to reflect and for our hearts to widen so we can connect with who we are?”
Trisha Hershey, Rest is Resistance
The project aimed to contribute to our collective memory by asking: ‘Where is the boundary of Granton?’ ‘Is it important that things stay the same or are changes welcome?’ ‘Is the decision-making process which is precipitating these changes a democratic one?’ and, ‘Is belonging somewhere important to a sense of identity?’
Once, Granton was outside the main city and shown in a ghostly grey on the plans. Once, there was no harbour, no outward reaching / welcoming arms from our shores. Later, Granton was part of Crammond, a large and sprawling geography which contained parts of the River Almond, Newhaven, Inverleith, most of Ferry Road, swathes of Leith, and Davidson’s Mains. It has got smaller over the years, halved and subdivided.
Walking the Granton Boundary copyright Tamsin Grainger
Maps
‘Walking like a Tortoise’ became the title for two mixed media art exhibitions based on the Granton walks. The introduction explained that I had used maps of the area from 1870 to the present day, skirted the urban and coastal landscapes of Granton, looked into hidden corners, viewed the architecture from unlikely angles, and spent time meeting those who live and work there.
I showed a lot of Granton maps in the exhibition, the ones which were used to plan the walks, and others which showed exactly where the area was and is according to different political and social groups, and in different eras. Granton is part of entities of varying sizes and shapes and it’s not always easy to know where the dividing line is between it and its neighbours – Pilton, Wardie and Trinity. There is ‘Edinburgh North(ern) and Leith’, the Scottish parliamentary constituency, and also the Westminster (UK government) ward of ‘Forth (Edinburgh)’. Then there’s the Edinburgh Parish of which we are part, the EH5 post code area, or the more generic ‘North Edinburgh’. Each map charts different distinctions and definitions which serve to separate and unify people and places. They are always political and prompt the question, ‘Are you in or out?’ Like all maps, they are networks; a tracery of streets and cycle tracks which lead to somewhere important. I walked these pathways and discovered that though they sometimes connect with each other, they are sometimes dead ends offering privacy, but no way through.
Through photographs, words, textiles and found materials, I asked how the act of slow walking can develop a sense of belonging somewhere, and how mindful noticing of the area, on foot, promotes appreciation of, and connection to what is home. Then the official boundaries are less important and it’s the human and natural links that matter.
New Building
The Granton, Royston and Wardieburn schemes (social housing estates), which started being built in 1932, have long been demolished and substituted. Much older, formerly industrial buildings have also been raised to the ground, and now green / brownfield sites have been replaced with tall, rectangular boxes of oddly coloured bricks with little history and no gardens (although some advertise dog grooming facilities). All this is despite Historic Environment Scotland stating, “The historic environment shapes our identity. It tells us about the past, the present – even points the way to the future.”
‘New’ building, Granton, Edinburgh
Planned at least as far back as 2019, it’s only recently that the Council, an hour’s bus journey away in the middle of the city, actually embarked on further extensive apartment building out here at Edinburgh’s edge. Although the architects and planners who spoke at a recent Pecha Kucha public event (EDI- v.45: RETROFIT “The greenest building is the one that already exists”) were unanimous in agreeing that changing existing buildings is infinitely better for the environment than putting up new ones, these newbuilds are now happening apace.
Slow
Walking slowly around and hearing people’s stories helped me and those who walked together in the community events feel part of a multi-cultural community. We found that we all have different backgrounds, but share a need to belong somewhere, that there is something unifying about how we live and use our local resources. Going to one of the Co-op stores slowly on foot is a chance for us to catch up on news; the Granton Community Bakery queue is ideal for some lively banter; returning your book and using the computer at the precious Granton Library offers time to listen to and exchange local gossip, securing community ties; and scything wheat in the Granton Community Garden followed by eating lunch together is a choice opportunity for swapping experiences.
Slow is “a position [that is] counter to the dominant value-system of ‘the times … We believe there is a positive potential in slowness as a means of critiquing or challenging dominant narratives or values that categorise contemporary modernity for many”.
Wendy Parking and Geoffrey Craig, Slow Living
Collaborations
The first Walking Like a Tortoise Community Walk took place on Friday 29 September 2023, followed by the opening of the exhibition at Granton:hub. Granton:hub is the home of the community archive where I volunteered and worked for 6 months during this project, meeting members of the public at the weekly drop-in sessions, sharing community walks, an open day, and art workshops, some with members of the Granton History Hub and volunteers.
Granton Waterfront were also funders of part of this project, incorporating more community walking and including translations of the text into Arabic and Polish, art workshops for children and for adult carers, and an evening of community sharing and discussion – Women’s Heritage in Granton and North Edinburgh which focused on Black women and women of colour and involved Edinburgh and Lothians Regional Equality Council (ELREC), the Edinburgh Carribbean Association, and Project Esperanza. This project was also involved in Cultural Heritage at the Metropolitan Edge (CUMET), with Granton:hub and the Edinburgh College of Art.
Walking Like a Tortoise exhibition at Granton:hub (September 2023)
Visiting the exhibitionCommunity mapping
A children’s workshop was held at the Edinburgh Central Library on 14 September (see below). On 18 September 2024 there was an adult event: a tour of the exhibition, a slow walk (like a tortoise – a style of marital art), an explanation of the project in the context of geography (counter-mapping), anthropology and the changing population from the past to the present, and an author/artist reading from The Wall (short-listed for a Sound Walk September Award).
Children’s workshop at Walking Like a Tortoise exhibition Edinburgh Central Library Sep 2024
I have now circled these roads and byways many times, and as a long-time Zen practitioner I always aim to walk without expectations of what I may find, to be in the moment. I’m ready to encounter and notice what arises. Though I’m a psychogeographer, I resist straying if my interest is piqued, sticking instead to the prescribed boundary route, but taking care and paying equal attention to the urban and the rural, the so-called banal and the beautiful.
There were more questions arising from the Walking Like a Tortoise project
The City of Edinburgh Council have sliced off the coastal strip and named it Edinburgh Waterfront. Does that mean that we need to let go, then, of that fragment of Granton and accept that our border is now an inland one, that we have no seaside?
The Council have also renamed buildings and streets, disorienting older, local people and confusing their memories. Was this necessary? Did they take care to think it through or were considerations of image more important?
Granton has no equivalent of the Leith ‘Persevere’ emblem, and I took to thinking about and discussing what one might look like. I wondered whether the tortoise could be part of it. What do you think? What else could we add to represent our community?
Stitched Steps
Tensions
There are tensions at this edge of Edinburgh. A young Chinese woman told me about her feelings of loss over the cutting down of trees overnight to make way for new blocks of flats, despite the fact that the previous day she and other residents had chained themselves to the railings to make it very clear they were opposed.
Flora and Fauna – Heritage
I walked to the fringe, to the beach and wastelands at the border of Granton where the best wild herbs grow for foraging, and where there is hidden art. I diverted into the centre where the library and health centres, homes for the elderly, and clubs for young people are. I wrote about it on Caught by the River magazine. Places transform all the time, but it became plain that the alterations that people and the climate have wrought on the built-up environment and natural spaces are happening at a rapid pace; there are new no-go areas, streets and stations with new names, and views which have disappeared.
Slowly wandering the boundary and making artwork has stimulated a deeper understand of local history and heritage, but how much of this will have soon vanished?
Secular, Urban Pilgrimage
I often make secular pilgrimage in places previously unknown to me, and though Granton is familiar territory, it is nevertheless a pilgrimage of sorts. As with the St Magnus Way, I left home, visited venerated places, and returned to my doorstep. There was no triumphant arrival, just a simple home-coming. It was, however, inevitably a sort of transformation – for the landscape through which I travelled, for the other human and more-than-humans (plants, birds, animals) I met along the way, and for me. After all, any stepping changes a place and it’s inhabitants.
Sound Walk Map (Edinburgh) A link to a map which shows the locations of my three site-specific sound walks: The Wall, No Birds Land and Is There a Place for REVOLution or Peace and Biscuits
Walking without a donkey 