become a tourist in your own city Look Again @ Garthdee Campus Look Again - main festival 20 - 24 April 2017 27 April - 1 May 2017 FESTIVAL GUIDE Introduction Useful Information A very warm welcome to Look Again Festival of familiar, uncovering the little-known, and asking Aberdeen Festivals Booking: Visual Art and Design 2017. In this, our third year, questions about our place in the wider world. we are bigger and bolder than ever, bringing you Festivals in Aberdeen are unique, inspiring and most of To book one of the talks, events or 11 new commissions across the city and RGU Whether born, brought up, educated or living all, entertaining. workshops visit: www.eventbrite.com campus (Look Again @ Garthdee Campus – see here, most of our invited artists and designers and search for your chosen event. P25), as well as plenty of talks, tours, exhibitions, share strong connections to the north east; we For its third year, Aberdeen Festivals looks forward films and workshops for all to enjoy at our partner all want to show how creativity can transform to representing eleven of the city’s major cultural Contact: venues. a place. Look Again’s wider purpose is to be a festivals. The festivals will work alongside each other to catalyst to a stronger creative scene in the region, collaborate on one-off performances, grow audiences If you have any queries or would like 2017 is Scotland’s Year of History, Heritage and working year round so that more artists, designers and strengthen Aberdeen’s cultural sector. more info please contact us via social Archaeology, and the artists and designers we and makers can stay and thrive here, enhancing media or email: have worked with have spent time researching the quality of life and generating a buzz across Aberdeen Festivals is made up of some of the biggest [email protected] our city through its historic collections. the city for everyone. and best festivals Scotland has to offer. With world-class performances and international premieres, the diversity Travel: Aberdeen has some of the oldest and most We would like to thank all those who have helped of festivals will run throughout 2017, showcasing the best complete archives in the UK; UNESCO recognised to make the festival possible, in particular our talent from arts and science to music and dance. First Bus - no. 1/2 (every 10mins) city archives and those at Aberdeen Harbour funders Creative Scotland, Aberdeen City Council Aberdeen City Centre - RGU Campus Board, the UK’s oldest company, to the Seven and Robert Gordon University. Aberdeen Festivals members are: SPECTRA, Aberdeen Incorporated Trades dating back to the 1200s. Jazz Festival, Look Again, May Festival, Scottish First Bus - no. 23 (every 20mins) We have also explored the objects and artworks Find out more information about Look Again Traditional Boat Festival (STBF), Aberdeen International Aberdeen City Centre - GHAT, ARI cared for by Robert Gordon University and Visual Art & Design Festival on the website: Youth Festival, TechFest, North East Open Studios uncovered the stories of a former record shop. www.lookagainfestival.co.uk (NEOS), True North, DanceLive and sound. Stagecoach - no. 35 (every 30mins/hour) This approach has allowed the artists and #lookagain2017 Aberdeen City Centre - Banff designers to look at our city with fresh eyes, thoughtfully bringing new perspectives to the Index Festival Hub p3 Map / Festival Overview Thank you P5 Commissions P17 Talks + Events + Workshops In the hub, filmmaker Fraser Denholm will show P19 Day of Play Location: a programme of short documentaries he was P21 Art Partners To our Look Again 2017 artists & designers, commissioned to make over the past 6 years, volunteers, interns, advisors, funders, 49 Belmont St, P25 Look Again @ Garthdee Campus capturing the wealth of creative and cultural art partners, venues, local businesses, RGU staff Aberdeen activity in Aberdeen. Projects showcased involve & students, individuals, family & friends AB10 1JS key cultural partners such as SMART, City Moves Dance Agency, Aberdeen International Youth Times: 10.00am - 5.00pm Festival and Aberdeen City Council. key Pop in to see us here before you start your look talk Look Again Team: around Look Again! family friendly ‘Nothing Ever Happens in 27 April – 1 May event Sally Reaper, Festival Director wheelchair Hilary Nicoll, Associate Director Our friendly festival assistants will be on hand Aberdeen’ // FREE // access to help with information and directions, and you Cultural events film archive workshop Claire Bruce, Festival Programme Co-ordinator 2010-2016 Belmont Filmhouse Duncan Cockburn, Festival Chair can stop for a break and some refreshments at indoors Belmont Street Natalie Kerr, Cultural Assistant any time during the festival, or to enjoy one of by Fraser Denholm Aberdeen our screenings or talks. outside exhibition Hatti Voar, Volunteer Co-ordinator toilets sculpture 1 2 3 4 Thomson & Craighead Here London based visual artists Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead work across video, sound, sculpture, installation and online space. Through sensitive appropriation of images, texts, and data from online and archived sources, the artists produce generous, lyrical works that both exercise the dramatic conventions of Here is a custom road cinema and examine the changing socio-political structures of the information age. sign indicating how far the sign is from They present a new generative moving image work for Look Again called Control Room alongside two itself if pointing in the existing artworks, Aberdeen Wall (2010 – 2017) and Here (2013). direction of the North or South pole. In doing so www.thomson-craighead.net perhaps it reminds us that we are not isolated from the rest of the world but are in fact part Partner archive - of a closed system. The Aberdeen Harbour sign is fabricated to UK Board road furniture standards and displays distance in miles. Aberdeen Wall Aberdeen Wall is a physical manifestation of the invisible city all around us; a poetic snapshot of social networking traffic from within a three-mile Control Room radius of the exhibition location, AB11 5BQ. During the run up to Look Again, publicly Control Room is the product of time the artists available status updates spent last summer researching the Aberdeen will be selected then Harbour Board archives where they found three published as an array carousels of 35mm slides, which had originally of typeset fly posters been part of a corporate audio-visual presentation that reveal the idle most likely made during the 1980s. There were mutterings of ourselves no sound recordings or documentation with the to ourselves as a form slides and so Jon and Alison have created their of concrete poetry. own fictional account to accompany them; an interview speculating on the events, times and places these images describe. Part interrogation and part therapy session the dialogue never With thanks to: concludes. In fact each question, response and 27 April – 27 May image is endlessly being recombined randomly as 10.00 – 17:00 the work plays in its own attempt to consider how Peacock Visual Arts’ Project Room any artefact in any archive can mean quite different 11 Castlegate things at different times. // FREE // 5 6 The Listener Outreach + Education As part of The Listener, Jason Nelson has been knowledge and skills and their creative and supported by Creative Learning at Aberdeen City critical thinking. Council to work with two city schools, Quarryhill Primary and Bridge of Don Academy, engaging Creative Learning support increased The Listener with the lives of young people living opportunities for learning and artistic and studying in Aberdeen. practitioners to work together to inspire children’s learning, and the wider project Over 100 pupils from P5 – S2 took part in practical around The Listener is a fantastic example of workshops, working together to create large this. scale sculptural forms. These forms reflect the trumpet-like shapes which are so central to The “All pupils at Bridge of Don Academy Listener but also stand as works in their own right, very much enjoyed the workshop and the giving a visual and collective voice to the identity department was buzzing. The artists were of these young people at this particular moment fantastic and lots of positive encouragement in the life of the city. and feedback were given to the pupils.” Art & Design Teacher, Bridge of Don Academy. As well as being a unique opportunity for pupils and teachers to engage with a contemporary Pupils work will be displayed in Central Library practising artist, Jason’s workshops have linked from 19 April - 1 May. in with each school’s Expressive Arts curriculum, developing pupils’ practical art & design Partner archive - Aberdeen City & Aberdeenshire Archives The Listener is a fantastical folly, a sort of sitootery Trades, and a wide range of community and interest (a place to sit out, an alcove, a place of retreat), a groups, the artist has collected histories and ‘machine for listening’. It appears to simultaneously urban myths that can be heard from the sculpture, hear, record and transmit fragments of narrative and suggestive of the collective consciousness or personal accounts emerging from the environment identity of a place, in this case, Aberdeen. in which it sits. With large trumpet-like shapes dominating its design, the viewer might recall Jason Nelson is an artist based in Dundee, with gramophone horns, ear trumpets or pre-radar a practice that would best be described as acoustic mirrors and listening devices that are ‘participatory’. His work is often a response to overtly connected to ideas of audio transmission context and exists as a result of direct engagement and reception; beautifully engineered and hand with people, their environments and their built, this sculpture is in part an attempt to visualize relationship to it. listening. www.jasonnelson.co.uk The Listener is perhaps more than a sculpture, it is both an object to be viewed and a space to be interacted with.