Documentary of Aberdeen harbour to be shown

A fictional documentary about Aberdeen harbour is to go on show at a festival.

Artists Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead will exhibit three pieces at this year’s Look Again festival.

Control Room is the product of 1980s 35mm slides from the Aberdeen harbour archives combined with an interview speculating on events during the time.

Both artists, who have exhibited all over the globe but are based in London and the Highlands, have North-east links, with Alison coming from the Granite City and Jon’s dad being from Stonehaven.

Jon said: “Look Again asked us if we would be interested in doing something with harbour archives.

“Because of our connections we thought it would be really interesting. It’s a new work from an audio visual prism. A lot of credit has to go to the Aberdeen Harbour Board which gave us access to the images.”

Part interrogation and part therapy session, the dialogue never ends.

Each question, response and image is recombined randomly in an attempt to consider how an artefact can mean different things at different times.

It will be on show at Peacock Visual Arts’ Project Room alongside two of their other pieces – Aberdeen Wall and Here.

Aberdeen Wall is a series of fly posters with messages collected from public social media posts made in Aberdeen.

The idea is to give an insight into what people have been talking about, with some surprises.

Alison said: “It’s really interesting seeing what people in Aberdeen have been talking about, tweeting things like eating ravioli in the middle of the night.”

Jon added: “Or stuff about Pittodrie.”

Here is a custom road sign indicating how far the sign is from itself if pointed towards the North or South pole.

Look Again formally kicks off on Thursday and will run until Monday, May 1.

Pre-festival events have already begun at Robert Gordon University’s Garthdee campus and will last until Monday.