For November’s Digbeth First Friday, we hosted an evening of Samhain inspired performances, where Linda Stupart, Hasti, and Kasra Jalilipour shared their amazing work with us.
Samhain is a Celtic Pagan festival which marks the ending and beginning of the year. This festival has historically been celebrated widely across Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man. With the coming of Christianity to the British Isles, Samhain shifted into what we now know as Halloween. It is the time of year when the veil between this world and the next is at its thinnest, leaving the boundaries between the two blurred and porous. We interpret Samhain as the beginning of Winter in the Northern Hemisphere, the Gaelic word for November, the celebration of the end of Harvest time, a queer turning, a time to venerate all ancestors.
We recognise that we don’t currently have an accessible gallery space, and people may not be able to visit us in person for a whole multitude of reasons. As such, we worked with Robert Alexander films to produce recordings of each performance, so that they can be viewed from the comfort of your own home, and from anywhere in the world. These recordings will be available until Monday 2 December, and each has a transcript accompanying it, available as both a PDF and a Word document.
