LATE NIGHT TALES LEITHLATE
As the area’s creative renaissance continues, director Morvern Cunningham tells David Pollock what’s in store for June’s four-day LeithLate celebration
‘L eith is a good news story these days – “it’s fabulous, it’s on the up!” – but there’s another side to that,’ explains Morvern Cunningham, director of the LeithLate festival, now in its seventh year. ‘There’s an element of precarity to the area as well: whether you live here or you’re an artist who works here. One of our exhibitions [programmed by Summerhall’s former arts curator Holly Knox Yeoman] is at the Sikh social enterprise café Punjabi Junction, which is currently under threat of property development.’ Featuring Stephanie Mann and an opening by David Sherry, the exhibition invites viewers to build their own installation from food and other items which will eventually be distributed to Edinburgh North East Food Bank.
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Cunningham points out that Leith is on a particular kind of knife-edge at the moment, but this is why it has a unique energy. Maritime and working-class roots gave way to the poverty of the 1980s and then a rapid inl ux of artists looking for cheap studio space. Then there are many residences which have sprung up in the last 18 months, and now more wealthy insurgents. thing in the recently Financial Times companies saying looking for cheap ofi ce space all want to move to Leith now. I thought, “is this the future?”’
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Maybe, but for now Leith is still climbing the peak of a creative renaissance which hopefully won’t crash when all the artists are priced out.
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The centrepiece of the annual, four-day LeithLate festival is its Thursday night artwalk, with 25 weekend- long exhibitions debuting up and down Leith Walk. This the Leith Walk Police Box, Ltd Inc Corporation’s new studio at the Old Ambulance Depot, a community stage on the lively Kirkgate precinct, and an intervention by Creative Electric at the local laundrette.
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‘I see LeithLate as being part art opening, part pub crawl, part doors open day,’ says Cunningham, taking a break from meetings in the Out of the Blue Drill Hall, a well-established grassroots Leith art space near her house. ‘And a party!’ This year she says she’s dedicated to living up to the ‘Late’ part of the festival’s title with a Thursday night afterparty hosted by Lost Map Records at Henderson Halls featuring Kid Canaveral and Savage Mansion, FiniTribe DJs at Franklin Cricket Club on Saturday night, and a closing party at Custom Lane on Sunday evening. That i nal venue is one of the elements of this year’s LeithLate which make it so much more than it has been in the past: the refurbishment of both the lane and the historic Custom House into artists’ studios creates a large new creative space i t for Sunday’s all-day party, while the Hidden Door festival’s assistance in clearing out the old Leith Theatre paves the way for choreographer Luke Pell’s Friday night dance performance In the Ink Dark (pictured). This conscious combination of the area’s heritage and future helps give LeithLate its character as a festival.
This year, regular tours of the area’s murals (some, by artists like Kirsty Whiten and Elph, commissioned by Cunningham herself) will return, joined by a Public Poetry Trail hosted by Edinburgh Makar Christine de Luca. Plus, there’s a video installation by recent Glasgow School of Art graduate and LeithLate award-winner Clara Hastrup in the historic Trinity House’s unexplored vaults. ‘They asked us not to say they’re secret, because school trips go there all the time,’ laughs Cunningham. ‘But in all my years living here in Leith, I actually didn’t know about them. Shining a light on the unexplored places around us is all part of the fun.’
LeithLate, various venues, Edinburgh, Thu 15–Sun 18 Jun, leithlate.co.uk 1 Jun–31 Aug 2017 THE LIST 29