24 August 2011
The List

Film series documents responses to work by Aidan Moffat, Josie Long and Ross Sutherland.

While everyone know about the existence of the Edinburgh Art Festival, a series of collaborations have been quietly reflecting on the works exhibited in the various spaces around the city. Suzy Glass (behind the creative social network Central Station) and Angie Bual (recently the producer of the National Theatre of Scotland’s innovative arts bar Allotment) are two halves of the company Trigger, and have been initiating these live events.

Inviting a variety of artists and performers to respond to individual pieces or exhibitions from the Art Festival, the result has been several pieces combining music, video and political discussion, all documented by filmmaker Daniel Warren. Aidan Moffat – best-known as providing mellow vocals for Arab Strap – recorded two separate performances: the first a musical accompaniment to the display of rooms in a Romanian castle that forms the work Peles Empire at Sierra Metro, and in which the process of reproduction is a major theme; and secondly, with the background of Robert Rauschenberg’s Botanical Vaudeville, Moffat reads a series of haiku-esque snippets of pieced together headlines from local newspapers, which complements the American artist’s collage.

Josie Long collaborates with Ellie Harrison (the artist behind A Brief History of Privatisation at Inspace) through a discussion about politics and Britain’s broken society with a poignant backdrop of recent riot footage. The left-wing comedienne’s other detour looks at Martin Creed’s revamped Scotsman’s Steps with the processes of Ingrid Calame, walking up and down them finding shapes in the marble to draw on a pad.

As an homage to John Byrne’s legendary TV series Tutti Frutti, author and comedian Ross Sutherland played a clip with a story inspired by own life narrated over it. Anecdotes about rave culture and teenage parties crop up as he chooses to work I’m Just A Lonely Guy into the theme (the B-side to Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti). His later piece took David Mach’s Precious Light as inspiration for a short story. Two of the final Trigger commissions were taken up by Nigel Barrett and Louise Mari of Shunt, bringing to life both the centuries-old portraits at Bourne Fine Art, and Laura Ford’s melancholic Weeping Girls at Jupiter Artland.