In The City

This year the Festival asked three artists to respond to the unique history and architecture of Edinburgh. One walk and two podcasts will lead you through the city in quite unexpected ways. The podcasts are available for download at edinburghartfestival.com from 5 August.

Silver Smoke of Dreams {in the Footsteps of The English Opium- Eater}
Jim Colquhoun: Walk
Meet at The Mitre at 133 High St
22 Aug, Noon
FREE, book in advance by E: [email protected] or T: 07500 461 332

With this walk artist and Pataphysical Cartographer Jim Colquhoun will attempt to forge a ‘Northwest Passage’through the city in the footsteps of the English Opium-Eater – Thomas De Quincey – sometime resident of Edinburgh and lifelong slave to the dreaded Blackdrop. In so doing we will recreate De Quincey’s drug-fuelled perambulations by other means. Comfortable shoes advised, allow 2 hours.

Orpheus and Eurydice
Ruth Barker: Podcast Performance

Download a poetic train of thought to accompany you through the streets of the city. Orpheus and Eurydice is a new site-specific text for Edinburgh, linking the capital’s unique topography with the meter of walking pace, and the classical myth of the underworld.

Tracing the Bastard Gum
Emmett Walsh: Podcast recital with pdf of 20 Polaroid photographs

Reciting the perambulations of a botanical investigator who ‘no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company’, actor David Dixon (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) searches Edinburgh’s Botanic Gardens for the archival remnants of the extinct Commidendrum rotundifolium tree of the island of St Helena.