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Wed 26 Aug
Rachel Sermanni | Beatrix Potter Garden
18:00 - 22:00
Doors Open 18:00
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Wed 26 Aug
Rachel Sermanni | Beatrix Potter Garden
18:00 - 22:00
Doors Open 18:00
A Birnam Book Festival Fringe Event, Chance Operations with Martine Foltier Pugh will appeal to aspiring and practising writers and artists alike. In the course of the workshop, you will learn how to pick words randomly from newspapers and books and how to present your findings. You will take home your own blackout poems that are visually striking works of art in themselves and some fresh ideas to develop further.
Words inspire Martine, in a playful way. ‘Chance Operations’ is called after Dada and the Surrealists who were fascinated by Freud’s study of dreams and the subconscious. They experimented with simple techniques to generate text randomly and independently of the author’s control and rational thinking. ‘Letting go’ feels liberating when everything else we do is about making hard choices. The process becomes meditative and brings about strangely evocative and uncanny juxtapositions, little poetic nuggets even, surprising and otherworldly.
glide wonderful doubt - arching choice in shallow summer - soft despair never so true
Of French and Italian heritage, writer and artist Martine Foltier Pugh grew up near Paris and has lived in Scotland since her early twenties. She writes about art and artists, notably Scottish colourist Marj Bond. Her visual practice is text based. She is a member and regular exhibitor with the collective Heartwood Artists, has run a series of concrete poetry workshops during an artist residency in Abbeyhill primary school in Edinburgh and earlier this year gave a Chance Operations workshop in Birnam Arts.
Box Office
Open periodically throughout the week | Book online 24/7
Cafe
Daily | 10 - 4
Great exhibition and performance spaces. Lovely terrace and indoor seating with lots of light. Great food and drinks and even a garden next-door for a stroll afterwards. Like
John Kirkwood | Google Reviews
Welcome to Birnam Arts, a boutique multi-purpose arts, conferencing and entertainment venue.
Pop in to the Foyer Cafe for breakfast, grab a delicious coffee with a selection of our homemade baking or enjoy a light lunch whilst browsing on the free WiFi. Wander upstairs to view the latest of our monthly art exhibitions before visiting the world of Beatrix Potter, or the Gift Shop to purchase a special gift for your loved ones or yourself!
We had not planned to present a hybrid festival, however that changed when one of our main authors tested positive for Covid. I greatly appreciated how the team worked with us to pivot and present remotely in part, making full use of your enhanced video conferencing equipment. As a result, we were able to deliver quite complex events with several elements all showing on screen simultaneously. The audio-visual quality was excellent, and our audiences were delighted that these events could still go ahead, in spite of Covid. The author in question was really pleased that he could join us on screen and remarked that he had not been so well supported in this way at any other festival.
Fiona Ritchie | Birnam Book Festival 2022
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The Birnam Book Festival Committee were so pleased with how the new facilities in the Auditorium added to an extremely professionally presented event. The lighting allowed us to create staging to match the country’s leading book festival events, such as we’ve seen in Edinburgh.
Fiona Ritchie | Birnam Book Festival 2022
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