Hidden Door 2025, 
The Paper Factory, Edinburgh
★★★★★

WORDS and images can’t do justice to the enormous achievement of the Hidden Door Festival, that took place in a vast abandoned Paper Factory on the outskirts of Edinburgh, last weekend. But the implications are astounding.

Just consider — one workforce left after 40 years of industrial production, and another steps in. The first are print workers, and the second cultural workers; two distinct sectors of social labour that don’t have a union in common. Yet what this festival explores is the subtle and sensitive interconnection between the two, and the vast potential for creative collaboration.

It raises the question: why are arts workers unsupported by unions when their work is so rich with celebration of working-class experience and culture, as is in evidence here, again and again?

Image

Hidden Door have been opening up forgotten urban spaces in Edinburgh for 15 years and staging an annual festival for the past decade, demonstrating what happens when you give generous space to contemporary artists in all disciplines who are unrepresented by the mainstream galleries and institutions.

The work of Paul Meikle, for example, who makes beautiful geometric compositions from the discarded scrap of a local adventure playground, really stood out to me for the way it solved the problem of what should be done with the cherished material of yesterdays written-off childhood.

Image

He’s typical of the many artists who have taken up the chance, and the occupation of The Paper Factory is the most wildly ambitious expansion of the Hidden Door project to date: 15-and-a-half acres of factory floor, disused machinery, leaky roofs, and cavernous sheds.

The sheer scale of the place, and of the confidence that artists can use it was breathtaking. I have never seen a video so big as Abby Warrilow and Lewis Gourlay’s ecstatic post industrial dance duet Everyone Left; nor one so beautiful and so clearly derived from the space and the sense of a departed workforce.

That confidence has taken 15 years to develop and Hidden Door have come of age. They know their audience. They know how it likes to explore. They know how it relishes the real, lightly touched by art.

Beside the biggest machine room were the old lockers where you find boots and overalls, betting slips and team photos, H&S guidance and threatening letters about absenteeism. In those lockers, along with the discarded stuff are the voices of the workforce and you can tune in, specifically to the warm Edinburgh accents of Tim Scott who worked here from 1985 to 2023 when it closed; and Marlyn Price who worked for two months in 1969, before art school. The story of the noise, the wages, the slow pace of promotion.

Image

The piece is a collaboration between artists Eszter Marsalko and Valerie Reid, journalist Neil Cooper, musicians Lawrence Boothman, Tom Green and Stephanie Lamprea and performer Tsoi Huen Wong. It could only exist in that place for the five days of the festival, and yet it was exactly what you’d want to find in any old workplace: aural history, the real place more or less untouched, a few careful acts of curation. A masterpiece, and a template for a million others.

And, for the sheer fun of it, all the buttons in the machine control room had been rewired by a group called Factory Reset to trigger disco lights, strobes and massive floods of colour, all without disturbing the detritus and graffiti left behind on the last day, equally cherished for the human workers’ story it tells.

This is not even to mention the evening programme of bands, dance and spoken word, nor the fact that entry was free (many people came with kids) and you paid what you could. And now all that’s left are the massive murals, also commissioned by the festival, themselves staggeringly memorable.

Unions — take notice please. This brilliant festival is the work of an immensely gifted and sympathetic workforce. They have alot to give you, and they need your support.

For more information see: hiddendoorarts.org