EAF X Art Monthly Writer Ren Scateni on artists who are remaking Scottish histories.

Sprawling across Edinburgh every August – the busiest month for cultural activities in the Scottish capital – the Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) is at the heart of the city’s artistic mycelial network. Although initially envisaged as a marketing exercise for the numerous art galleries and museums looking to attract new visitors, EAF’s role has evolved over time. Under the helm of director Kim McAleese, the festival has gradually developed a distinctive identity and curatorial vision, one that champions its many satellite collaborators and partners while centring sustained civic engagement and marginalised voices. For example, one of the connecting threads in this year’s programme revolved around unearthing queer narratives and existences, weaving them into the social tapestry and landscape of Scotland. Thanks to these and many other people’s efforts, narratives of queer and particularly trans people are now visible here whereas elsewhere they have long been silenced and consciously expunged from culture in order to concoct a false version of Scottish history that is looking increasingly implausible – yet it is a silencing that is all-too-felt with today’s increasingly painful, divisive and hateful rhetoric found on social and mainstream media.

Lewis Hetherington and CJ Mahony’s film who will be remembered here, 2025, plays a key part in the festival’s acts of defiance. For this project, Hetherington and Mahony surveyed numerous sites found in Scotland’s Historic Environment portfolio, the duo presenting a curated shortlist of potential sites to four writers and inviting each to respond to a given site. Staged across four acts, the resulting ensemble unfolds from dusk to dawn, stretching across four languages – Scots, Gaelic, English and British Sign Language. The film surgically maps where gender variance, sexual expression or disability has been effaced, with all the writers, bar one, reading their writing in their chosen site, reinscribing these often historically hostile locations with their bodies and texts.

The theatre maker and actor Robert Softley Gale questions how he would have been perceived or welcomed as a disabled gay man during the industrial revolution’s heyday. Softley Gale uses the site of the Biggar Gasworks, now a museum but originally a powerplant built in 1839 that was one of the first small-town industrial coal plants and provided gas for 130 years. The writer questions and offers an unexpected set of commonalities found in understandings of obsolescence and productivity, of how value and use are conceived, and how the body and machine continue to inform one another.

Miles away in the northwest of Scotland stand Dun Telve and Dun Troddan, two unusually close brochs (circular stone towers) from 500BCE. These locations inspired performer and poet Harry Josephine Giles to weave a story rooted in sisterhood, community and care. Similarly, on the Isle of Arran are the Machrie Moor Standing Stones, which form part of a landscape that dates back to 2000BCE. It is here that the deaf Scottish-Thai actor Bea Webster delivered an emotive piece that centred on the erasure of deaf histories and literature, and how it impacted and shaped their identity growing up.

The contribution from writer and academic Robbie MacLeòid is filmed in the austere landscape around Fort George – a military base built by the British Empire in the wake of the 1746 Battle of Culloden aimed at controlling the Scottish Highlands. The Fort remains an emblem of this history and oppression, and MacLeòid draws attention to the repression of Highlanders under British rule but also the number of Scottish gay men who were imprisoned at Fort George for a love deemed unlawful. Speaking in Scottish Gaelic, MacLeòid refuses to physically enter this site of repression – finding it the only viable act of resistance left available to him. His distance from the site he questions marks a conceptual threshold in Hetherington and Mahony’s film: we see him standing on a solitary shore and facing the sea, the same sea that will possibly claim Fort George due to coastal erosion. MacLeòid invokes a return to nature: ‘a tree is growing. / Underground, in the darkness, / the homely darkness, / roots are moving. All around, / the ocean closes in. I hear it, / I hear it. A day will come / and ramparts will flinch, trees growing / up through them like arrows.’

The symbolism of trees was further evoked in Linder’s new EAF commission A kind of glamour about me. Performed at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, this collaboration between Linder, choreographer Holly Blakey, composer Maxwell Sterling and fashion designer Ashish Gupta, looked at how bodies (often women, non-binary and queer) have been historically controlled and coerced by the environment – or, indeed, how solace might be found. The mercurial aspects of appearance were captured in the trio of dancers’ costumes: sequined suits that caught the light in the fleeting sunshine, each expressing a different character; one outfit, for instance, was made with gaping holes to reveal the performer’s twitching muscles, while another was mantled in a sparkly fur-like garment. In a patch of open woodland, for over 45-minutes their movements were physically commanding, shifting from expressions of pain to exultation. At times it brought to mind the disturbing transmogrifications found in Greek mythology, for instance when Daphne became a laurel tree to escape Apollo’s lustful chase or when Myrrha transformed into a myrrh tree – either as punishment or as protection – after she slept with her father without his knowledge. Similarly, the dancers became entwined with the branches they held, as if erotically charged extensions of their bodies – from antlers in charge to locked in ambivalent embrace or forming a ritualised burial ground. The work captivated by shifting from the ludic to the tense, its punkish attitudes set at unpicking hardwired relations between gender conformity and nature.

At the EAF Pavilion – the hub of the festival, located on Leith Street in central Edinburgh – was the exhibition ‘Memory is a Museum’, which spot-lit histories of trans-masculine lives in Scotland. Commissioned by EAF’s civic programme as part of a long-term partnership with the Trans Masc Studies research project, which is run by artist Ellis Jackson Kroese, at its core the exhibition engages in ontological ruminations around what defines a museum, as an accompanying catalogue text explains: ‘[a] museum creates memory and recreates memory, regenerates memory, shapes memory, distils memory, expands memory. Museum excludes – memory forgets.’ Through books, pins, paraphernalia of the National Theatre of Scotland’s production of Adam – a play that tells the story of Adam Kashmiry, an Egyptian trans man who sought asylum in Scotland in 2010 – the exhibition questions whose stories are being erased, whose are made visible, and the mechanisms that control both access and representation. ‘Memory is a Museum’ is in itself an act of community building: it lives through the contributions of the Scottish trans-masculine community, of local collaborations, and of porous visitors willing to connect, touch, engage, protect, keep and remember. ‘Memory sits with community all afternoon. Community lays down in memory and falls asleep and dreams.’ Perhaps it’s only when institutions fail – along with their unquestioned privilege and boards of trustees – that the needs and calls of oppressed groups might dream and build alternatives. One museum at a time.

Ren Scateni is a writer and film curator based in Bristol.

Ren Scateni is the winner of the Edinburgh Art Festival x Art Monthly Writer’s Award 2025, an open call opportunity that supports the winner in attending the Festival then writing a text in response to any part of the EAF programme. Award selectors 2025: Helen Cammock, London-based Turner Prize-winning artist; Maria Fusco, Belfast-born working-class writer based in Scotland and professor of interdisciplinary writing at the University of Dundee; Kim McAleese, EAF director; Chris McCormack, Art Monthly associate editor.