Traversing the Scottish lowlands between philosophy and science, art and energy

A recent trip to Scotland for the pre-opening of the Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) stirred thoughts about the parallels between art and energy. If energy is indeed the building block of the universe and, within ecological frameworks, the sun is the root source of all energies morphed, is art then a source or form of energy; the sun to our creative endeavours or merely a catalyst for expressing everything in between our paralysing fears and defiant hope. Can we trace all human creations back to art—the aesthetics of period buildings surrounding The Royal Mile in the heart of Edinburgh, the lunch stop at a restaurant utilising the best of “local and artisan Scottish produce” and finally our resting place at Jupiter Artland—the spiritual home of X MUSE (Tenth Muse), an artisanal vodka brand that supported the 20^th anniversary of the festival.

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EAF is the UK’s largest annual festival of visual arts. This year, it spans the work of more than 200 artists, across multiple art disciplines, spread over 30 venues around the city. With its theme, CONNECT TO RESISTANCE, PEOPLE PERSIST, EAF 2024 is an open invitation to the public, “to pause and reflect on the conditions under which we live, work, gather and resist,” states the official release. The 20^th edition has a curatorial thread that binds matters of the natural world, personal histories, post-colonial landscapes and the issues at a global political stage, attempting to connect with its local context and the people who inspire change and resist inequity, isolation, destruction and despair.

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The tour began with Symbols of Time, a selection of 10 festival highlights chosen by Vadim Grigoryan, Co-founder and Artistic Director of X MUSE. Grigoryan distilled the selection to focus on shared values, materiality, energies and temporal qualities which are embodied in their signature spirit itself. The first stop at Ingleby Gallery took us inside a listed building on Barony Street with a magnificent glass dome. It displayed The Ringing Stone, a collection of paintings by artist Hayley Barker based in Los Angeles. The artworks reflected the artist’s belief in the power of plants, the potency of minerals and the concept that objects hold memory and energy that affects us.

The most awe-inspiring part of the tour was the Talbot Rice Gallery exhibition, Scottish Mission Book Depot Keta (June 29 – September 29, 2024). Spanning over five decades, it was a significant exploration of El Anatsui’s practice, making it the largest to have ever been staged in the UK. The display of works extended to the building’s façade, turning it into an open-air gallery for the public. Inside, the showcase opens with a monumental new commission made specifically for the gallery and then journeys through a large selection of Anatsui’s iconic large-scale sculptural wall hangings created using reclaimed metal from the bottling industry in Ghana and Nigeria.

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A chance to touch and examine the raw but careful stitching of the artist’s signature metal tapestry that folds like cloth and upholds like armour brought about a visceral understanding of the embodied tensions, socio-cultural and environmental, held in that tiny sample. The technique, most recently seen in an extraordinary commission for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall at an impressive yet intimidating scale, felt anything but relatable. Barricaded with low-lying ropes, the ability to touch is a transfusion of the artwork’s energies, mostly denied in formal setups. However, if art is energy, does it truly need preservation over tactile encounters in a contemporary visual arts context? Rhetorically, are we protecting the market-ascribed value or securing its place in history, a hundred years from now, at the cost of how many thinking hands these energies could flow through and to what effect?

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The last stop on this trip was Jupiter Artland. Followed by experiential wild dining, the next morning found us walking through a picturesque landscape overlooking swaying barley fields, where outdoor sculptures, by the most formidable names in contemporary art, belong to and own the land, all at once.

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Set on the grounds of Bonnington House outside Edinburgh, Jupiter Artland is the brainchild of Nicky and Robert Wilson which opened to the public in 2009. Commissioned works by a remarkable roll call of contemporary artists including Anish Kapoor, Cornelia Parker, Charles Jencks, Andy Goldsworthy, Antony Gormley, Anya Gallaccio, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Helen Chadwick, Pablo Bronstein, Tania Kovats et al. emerge from the scapes of the land. On the guided tour, Robert Wilson, who is also the co-founder of X MUSE, shared insights and anecdotes about the concept of each sculpture that emanated from the energies felt, shared and transferred through their interaction with the artists, in this specific place, at that specific time. The particularity of time and place is a pivotal variant in any ecosystem. Art, evidently, is the sun and the source of all that is produced in this one, the artland.

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Perhaps art is energy and that is enough to find ways of supporting its sustainable regeneration within and outside of capitalist structures.

In philosophy, energy is seen as part of a continuum – encompassing activity and accumulation but also stillness. These are the broad terms used often to describe encounters with art – being comforted or held, moved, shaken or stirred. In energy, there is the idea of more. In art, beauty does more, it has a function to invite and inform, entice and incite. When faced with environmental threats, we look to science for solutions but to art for addressing our eco-anxieties. We agitate through art and organise in ways studied by social scientists. Perhaps art goes beyond the binary of source/form. Perhaps art is energy and that is enough to find ways of supporting its sustainable regeneration within and outside of capitalist structures.

The 20^th Edinburgh Art Festival is on view until August 25, 2024, across several venues in Edinburgh, Scotland.

This post was originally published on here