Free Entry
Programme Notes
by Michael Pattison
Play It Forward is a drop-in, hands-on 16mm workshop with film artist, curator and educator Lydia Beilby, editing and splicing a new restoration of the 1966 Hawick Pictorial. Promoting tactility as a key part of engaging with an archive, the workshops are open to everyone, from analogue artists to people who have never previously handled a material film strip. No sign-up is required.
The workshop takes place across two open sessions, one on Friday 1 May and another on Saturday 2 May, inside Heritage Hub, the exhibition space where we are also launching Oor Ain Film Archive, a new online resource and mediatheque dedicated to films made in Hawick and the Scottish Borders.
As its name suggests, Play It Forward is intended as an act of generosity, exploring the playful possibilities that open up when we consider an archival practice to be forward-facing as much as it is about the past. Through the workshops, Lydia and participants will consider what it means to work with rather than against archive material, about what is present and absent in an archive, and how contemporary interventions might address what is obscured within or excluded from a historical image.
The Hawick Pictorial was an annual snapshot and chronological account of the town’s events of public interest, made collectively by amateur cineastes under the auspices of Hawick Film Group between 1965 and 1980. All Pictorials have been digitised and remastered as part of Oor Ain Film Archive, with the 1966 entry printed onto a new 16mm print for the purposes of Play It Forward. In keeping with the communal and experimental spirit with which the Pictorials were made, Lydia will guide visitors through the splicing and editing process, creating a ‘people’s cut’: an entirely new work that will receive its world premiere in the space on Sunday 3 May, 60 years after the original Pictorial was made.
