who will be remembered here @ EAF Pavilion

Halfway up Leith Street, I am sucked into a revolving door on the ground floor of a tall glassy building. After half a rotation, it spits me out into a reception that has become a Pavilion. This block of offices is currently occupied by artists, the usual city centre development in reverse; white-collar work displaced by temporary studios. I enter through the gift shop, past a pile of books embossed with a provocation: 'who will be remembered here'. In a darkened room just beyond this question, a film created by artist CJ Mahony and playwright Lewis Hetherington becomes a portal to a multitude of answers.

We are transported to a gasworks in Biggar. Robert Softley Gale crawls across the small grey stones that make up the path to the building, the cobbles and gravel inhospitable to his wheelchair. The physical inaccessibility of this place is visible from the outset. Abandoned cylinder turned relic, another behemoth of the Scottish post-industrial landscape. Gasworks, factories, shipyards. Places that forged not only metal and industry, but ideas of what it might mean to be a man. Gale ruminates on purpose, how these kind of places never doubted their value, wondering how he might he come to understand his. “A useful queer? Isn’t that a contradiction?” he jibes, reflecting on the prejudiced assumption that gay men are unproductive while considering how society might force certain bodies to justify their existence with a use. But he faces the darkness with joy, finding happy usefulness in the daily routine of fatherhood. Caring, feeding, playing. An eternal purpose that will outlive any piece of industrial architecture.

Robbie MacLeòid is speaking Gaelic in Fort George, already a defiance. This is a place with oppression bricked into its walls. Originally built to suppress Jacobite rebellion and enforce a certain way of talking and dressing, it now continues as a British military base. A place where acts of love and ways of living might be illegal, but death and violence are always encouraged. He doesn’t appear to us inside the fort, but suggests that if he were to, it would be locked in its prison, the Black Hole. His fingertips trace the stone in complete darkness, searching for the indents of initials scratched in long before him. Another boy forced into the dark. He ends instead on the beach, looking outward, and reminds us that the land has been here long before any of its people and their empires, and will continue on after. A tree is growing in Fort George, the ocean closes in.

Harry Josephine Giles stands in the centre of a circular structure made of stone, another similar but more dilapidated building keeps watch nearby. These two brochs are situated unusually close to each other, suggesting friends rather than enemies built them. The rhythm of her speech is pure music, finding melody in the rolled-out R’s of a Scots language made to be spoken. Her voice gives each word an ominous texture that seems to transcend barriers of language and time. As I simultaneously listen and read the subtitles, I register moments of disconnect between my eyes and my ears, where the written word seems to fail the spoken. To anglicise a tattery coast or ragin God into a ragged, angry, loss. But translation is always a departure, a compromise, and in this case my ear is biased. I wonder what each poet might make of their on-screen translation, of how each Helvetica sentence grasped at their language, pulling it into the dominant, written English. However, to translate is also to open up, and this work is about letting people in. Even in our best attempts to understand each other, there is always a loss, but the potential of what might be gained in trying is so much greater.

The next site, another circle. Standing stones erected four thousand years ago. Bea Webster remembers visiting as a child but couldn’t find their story here. Instead, they draw on the power of these ancient stones and imagine what that history might be, knowing they must write their own since it was violently taken from them. What was it like being queer and deaf, Scottish and Thai, thousands of years ago? What would sign language have been like back then? Could it exist at all? To find the answers, we must peel back the layers of time and tune in to the psychic imprint left by those before us. Site is a container for stories. Webster gestures towards a new future, where an oppressive past is replaced with all the possibilities of who they might become, and the hope that those who come after might now know their history too.

The screen darkens to the soft glow of the credits and I am returned to an elongated bench in the back room of the Pavilion. While each site is beautifully filmed, the most poignant aspect of this work lies in the layering of stories and place through the performance of language. Writing through site, a queer archive for the future.

---

who will be remembered here, EAF Pavilion, run ended