Performing the Outside World brings together short films by UK-based artists and performers that explore themes of access to nature. Through simple, shared actions, the films evoke different sensory experiences - of touch and tactility, movement through landscape, shifting colours and textures. They question how elemental phenomena may be experienced when disability and limited infrastructure restrict access, and harness experimental, DIY solutions to negotiate these barriers. The films share a sense of wonder and fascination with the natural world, and joy in the freedom to explore, touch, and interpret these environments.&nbsp; All films include subtitles for d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing The title of this film programme is borrowed with gratitude from Abi Palmer’s article ‘<a href="https://wellcomecollection.org/articles/YV3HHRIAACEARa1V" target="_blank">A flat-packed forest</a>’ (wellcome collection, 18 October 2021)

Be Different Today was filmed over seven visually described sunrises on Portobello beach in February 2019.&nbsp;It has grown from Juliana’s passion for equal access to the arts and her experience of&nbsp;working with visually impaired audience for the last 15 years in Scottish galleries as a visual describer&nbsp;Consequently she considers visual description a creative practise akin to the making of a painting, and of equal benefit to visually impaired and sighted audiences alike. Juliana and Ruth’s collaboration speaks about the difficulty of describing the indescribable (such as colour, such as grief, such as love) and operates on the cusp of the personal and universal, drawing on each of the artists’ life experiences. They have also been inspired by a shared love of Portobello beach, ASMR youtube videos and transcendental meditation. The resulting film speaks of the dualities of living: of simultaneously keeping close and letting go. Ruth Barrie and Juliana Capes are artists and friends who both live and work five minutes from the beach in Portobello, Edinburgh. Ruth Barrie (1979, Glasgow) trained as a filmmaker at Edinburgh College of Art.&nbsp;She has directed documentaries for Channel 4 &amp; STV and regularly collaborates with musicians and artists to produce moving image work. Juliana Capes (1974, Grimsby) is an award-winning multi-disciplinary visual artist. She has worked in the arts in Scotland for the last 23 years, exhibiting most recently at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery, Royal Scottish Academy and Edinburgh Art Festival. The film was commissioned by LUX Scotland in partnership with BBC Scotland and Creative Scotland as part of Now&nbsp;&amp;&nbsp;Next.

Be Different Today

Filmed over seven visually described sunrises on Portobello beach in February 2019

Slow Progress is a small selection of documentation of physical practice of Julie Cleves and Robbie Synge, filmed mainly in Scotland within the period of 2015 - 2018. Sitting on the grass or moving along a forest path together are activities most friends might manage without much effort. Julie and Robbie's practice has involved developing simple but highly effective designs - wooden 'blocks' and 'boards' and a plastic version. Embedding these objects within choreographic actions, Julie and Robbie constantly enjoy searching for new challenges and places to share time together. Julie Cleves (London) and Robbie Synge's (Highlands) practice and friendship investigates the possibilities of sharing time in different spaces together, over-coming disability access issues with proactive and novel DIY design solutions. Founded twelve years ago in dance studio-based research around the possibilities of moving together on the floor, they soon became bored of the studio confines and took their practice into the public realm. Their adventurous spirit and highly visible performed actions seek to enable new personal shared experiences and to feed into overlapping discourses around access, design, cooperation and embodied actions and solutions.

Slow Progress

Slow Progress is a small selection of documentation of physical practice of Julie Cleves and Robbie Synge, filmed mainly in Scotland within the period of 2015 - 2018.

Forest Floor builds upon previous self-filmed documentation (as seen in Slow Progress). Shot in Abernethy Forest in the Cairngorms,&nbsp;Forest Floor&nbsp;considers different bodies and physical access challenges in a rural location. Close friends Julie and Robbie sit quietly together on the ground - a simple idea requiring a novel approach. “...a short film of astonishing beauty that redefines “adventure”... first they solve the technical challenge that besets all good adventures — how to get there — and then, they dance." - Keme Nzerem, Financial Times, May 2020. Julie Cleves (London) and Robbie Synge's (Highlands) practice and friendship investigates the possibilities of sharing time in different spaces together, over-coming disability access issues with proactive and novel DIY design solutions. Founded twelve years ago in dance studio-based research around the possibilities of moving together on the floor, they soon became bored of the studio confines and took their practice into the public realm. Their adventurous spirit and highly visible performed actions seek to enable new personal shared experiences and to feed into overlapping discourses around access, design, cooperation and embodied actions and solutions.

Forest Floor

Shot in Abernethy Forest in the Cairngorms, Forest Floor considers different bodies and physical access challenges in a rural location.

<img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/eventive-static/80b7bd338b387262abdc4d590f2c21d5.png" width="27" style="display: inline; margin: 0px 1em 1em 0px; float: left;">An audio description for this film is available <a href="https://campleline.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/abi-ad-edit-2-signed-off.mp3" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">here</a> All the worlds you’ll never see explores Abi’s relationship with her housebound cats. She lives on the third floor of an “accessible” building, but that doesn’t make it easy to access the outside. By default, Abi’s kittens are indoor cats, but she started to understand their desire for an outside which they cannot reach. It is a desire very similar to her own, which is why she brought them into her home to begin with. Abi writes “I, too, hunger for the outside world. I, too, am craving wildness.” Abi has been exploring ways of reproducing the outside world for her cats in ‘miniature’: foraging for found objects such as feathers, plants, and fallen twigs and leaves, and building small indoor forests for the cats to explore. She wanted to invite the experience of becoming lost in nature, to experience reverie. The process of sharing her findings has become a regular aspect of play and bonding. It’s bittersweet: in recreating and discovering aspects of the natural world Abi loves, is grieving for, and can’t access; and being aware that she has passed this experience on to them. Commissioned by <a href="https://www.shapearts.org.uk/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Shape Arts</a>, All the worlds you’ll never see&nbsp;is a short sensory film, originally designed for virtual spaces. Abi says “I wanted to explore the potential of an online gallery, by floating multiple films as if hanging in infinite space, but was surprised by how much my brain wanted me to organise the films as if on one wall of a white cube. This is a boundary I would love to keep pushing – what can the virtual world do for the way that we experience art that is different and transformative?” A note on poison: In the film, Abi wanted her cats to experience the magic of finding life growing in the strangest of places. Near her home, a fantastic meadow of wildflowers grows by a large and polluted roundabout. Abi picked some of the flowers and brought them home. However, when she researched the plants, she learned that many of these flowers are toxic to cats and potentially very harmful. “The conflict here is painful. I tried to create an accessible version of the outdoors for my cats but I was clearly projecting what I felt they&nbsp;should&nbsp;know rather than being led by their needs. It’s also true that the moment I picked the flowers, they lost what I attempted to convey. This very often happens in access. I am left reflecting on what it means to translate an experience in ways that are both powerful and safe for the bodies who will be taking part. How do you distill and translate the essence of a poppy without using a poppy? It always comes back to centring the user.” Animal welfare statement: throughout this process, the cats were closely supervised. No animals were harmed in the making of this film. Abi Palmer is an artist, writer and filmmaker exploring the relationship between linguistic and physical communication. Key work includes Crip Casino—an interactive gambling arcade parodying the wellness industry and institutionalised spaces—shown at Tate Modern, Somerset House and Wellcome Collection (2018-20)—and <a href="http://www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk/index.php/2020/03/sanatorium/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Sanatorium</a>—a fragmented memoir that jumps between a luxury thermal pool and a blue inflatable bathtub (Penned in the Margins, 2020).&nbsp;Personal essays and articles have been published by The Guardian, Vice and Wellcome Collection Stories.&nbsp;In 2016 she won a Saboteur Award for her multi-sensory poetry installation Alchemy. In 2020 she was awarded a Artangel Thinking Time award in order to address the pandemic. She was awarded a Paul Hamlyn Award For Artists in 2021. Abi can be found on <a href="https://twitter.com/abipalmer_bot" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Twitter</a> and <a href="https://www.instagram.com/abipalmer_bot/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Instagram</a> at @abipalmer_bot.

All the worlds you'll never see

All the worlds you’ll never see explores Abi’s relationship with her housebound cats whilst living on the third floor of an “accessible” building

Abi Palmer reads her text Self Portrait as a Mushroom in the Damp and Leafy Forest, originally commissioned by Wellcome Collection for 'This Book is a Plant: How to Grow, Learn and Radically Engage with the Natural World'. Published by Pilot Press in association with Wellcome Collection, 2022. You can also read the text <a href="https://campleline.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Wellcome-Self-Portrait-as-a-Mushroom-in-the-Damp-and-Leafy-Forest.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">here</a>.

Reading: Self Portrait as a Mushroom in the Damp and Leafy Forest

Join us on Sunday 4 August at 4pm to hear from artists Abi Palmer, Juliana Capes, Julie Cleves and Robbie Synge about their respective films and the processes behind them. This conversation will be hosted by Emma Jayne Park. Based in Dumfries &amp; Galloway, Emma is a dancer, theatre maker, collaborator, facilitator, movement director, trainee intimacy coordinator, choreographer, advocate, micro-activist and occasional drag king. Emma is currently a PushProject.Eu Artist, Associate Artist with the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival, and she recently undertook an Associateship with Scottish Dance Theatre/Dundee Rep, supported by the Surf The Wave Seed Generator. Her facilitation practice includes working with Federation of Scottish Theatre, EPAD, Imaginate and IETM. She has also advocated for freelancers rights as a speaker in Holyrood at the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFgGVZXOJWg" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Cross Party Group for Culture</a>. Her work will be done when practices that encourage mental well-being are embedded across the arts sector.

Performing the Outside World: Artists' conversation

Join us for a conversation with with filmmakers in the programme (Abi Palmer, Juliana Capes, Julie Cleves & Robbie Synge), hosted by D&G-based theatre maker and performer, Emma Jayne Park

Performing the Outside World

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Independent arts organisations based in rural SW Scotland, with a special focus on independent film & experimental cinema from around the world. Each film launches with a communal watch followed by a live Q&A. SDH subtitles for d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing available for all screenings. Please join us!