in_my_presence (IMP) is an improvisation collective of artists who combine visual and somatic methods to explore relationships between bodies, objects, space and history in outdoor locations and other sites. We use movement, sound, image and sculpture to communicate and document experiences of time and duration in live action.
The Granton Castle Walled Garden is a historic site currently redefining its function as a site of communal action, sharing, creativity and responsibility. The garden’s daily transformation takes place as an active dialogue between knowledge of the past and future potential. We are interested in how this process of transformation can be experienced as it happens. We focus on impressions, textures, rhythms and moods generated by the activities of the gardeners and volunteers. We inhabit the garden by carefully inserting our own layer of actions, partly functional, partly performative, which encourage viewers to ‘be’ in the garden more intensely, perhaps with more clarity or focus.
GRANTON
CASTLE
WALLED
GARDEN
Saturday 23 September 2017, 10am - 2pm free opening event
crossings and intervals live installation by improvisation collective in_my_presence
Caroline Park Avenue Edinburgh EH5 1SG, Scotland
For me, the garden is like a human body. I see the soil as the heart and the roots as the veins of the garden. What we see outside is deeply connected with the underworld, the external and internal parts create the whole entity; the hidden garden full of diverse life. I am fascinated by the roots when you dig them from the soil and deprived of the external parts they become something new, mysterious, strange, and secret.
Mariola Albinowska
Working with the garden, finding pathways visible and hidden. Making sculpture following the movement of dancers moving through thresholds and the arc of growth through and out of the soil.
Fiona McLachlan-Powell
The garden a sheltered gathering place for aeolian close and far sounds, letting wind whistle through a gap in my teeth and using my skull as resonator, the leaves and passing birds to the city and sea beyond. I’ve placed resonators under the earth and by passing places. Clive McLachlan-Powell
I find myself in a place where I am sinking, the earth underneath me is telling me to be soft and to melt and become one with it. There is no time, I am in the flow, following impulses that come to my conscious awareness from moment to moment. It is not me who decides where I am going or how I am moving. My journey is shaped by the way I respond to the impulses. This is a movement meditation, where I allow my body to respond without injuring or straining myself.
Helga MargrĂŠt Schram
Over the last few months, I have observed how the garden has evolved into its current condition as the beginnings of a thriving community garden. In response to the dynamic activity on site, I have sought places which I can inhabit through my bodily presence, as a volunteer gardener and as a dancer, leaving traces and memories behind, which I reencounter in the present moment. I see the garden as a choreographic laboratory, the site for an experimentation between the interplay of different modes of being and doing, and how one might articulate this interaction through a reexperiencing of my corporeal reality.
Adam Hussain
I am interested in how glimpses of things, fleeting and partial views of scenes, actions or stories can sometimes trigger focused sensations. Although gardening activities are processes that lead from A to B, I only focus on isolated moments of the action, and how these moments exist in concrete physical spaces. I perceive live images of action, which vibrate but do not evolve. In my film, I researched ways of making such images last a little longer. I tried to combine glancing with pausing, and create a series of ‘stretched’ glimpses of moments from gardening activities; as if time (or breathing) stopped for a little while, when glancing through the eye of my super 8 camera. I also wanted to insert the film in surroundings that would encourage viewers to also glance and pause; so that they can fully experience this film as a series of unexpectedly long glimpses.
Sophia Lycouris
inmypresence.eca.ed.ac.uk grantoncastlewalledgarden.wordpress.com contact: imp.process@gmail.com photos by Clive McClanahan-Powell / logo by Adam Hussain