Sprouts in Water
Collective, Edinburgh
18 Dec 2025
4 – 5:15pm
The An Deò screening at Collective presents a programme of short films exploring forms of embodied knowledge through stories that invite awareness in both the urgent and transcendent qualities of time.
Coinciding with Shen Xin’s exhibition Highland Embassy, Collective are excited to be collaborating with An Deò, an initiative based in Northern Isle of Skye that brings moving images to communities through screenings and gatherings. Founded by Shen Xin and connected through an ecosystem of creatives and collaborators, An Deò aims to align the creative efforts in living and making.
Screening order:
Scent Line of a Moving Mountain Eiko Soga, 17:59, 2025,
Saffron, Thomson and Craighead, 10:36, 2018
Deviant, Emily Beaney, 14:12, 2021
but this is the language we met in, Grounds of Coherence #1, Shen Xin, 12:16, 2023
Aerial, Margaret Tait, 4:00, 1974
Scent Line of a Moving Mountain, Eiko Soga
Scent Line of a Moving Mountain, Digital film 17.59 minutes, 2025, Japanese and Ainu with English subtitles
Scent Line on a Moving Mountain attempt to embody the felt knowledge exchanged between an indigenous Ainu elder, Ms Kane Kumagai and non-human beings through processes of Samani Ainu cooking in Hokkaido, Japan. Ms Kumagai’s approach is an indigenous method for living and inhabiting the planet in sustainable ways that is no longer practiced every day in Japan. While cooking, Ms Kumagai shared tales and songs from her ancestors. Filmed in 2023, when the artist was in early stages of pregnancy, the film charts the physical developments and new perspectives about the ecological, social, and cultural environments. With enhanced physical senses, the film explores how motherhood contributes to thinking about the ecological future.
Saffron, Thomson and Craighead
Saffron, Thomson and Craighead, 10:36, 2018
Saffron, is a documentary portrait of Kasia Pogo, who owns and runs this world food shop in Inverness. She sells specialist foods from around the world to her customers visiting the shop from all over the Scottish Highlands and Islands. Kasia is the bridge between a network of global trade and a diverse clientele making their respective pilgrimages to her shop. In this short film the artists explore in more detail just who comes to the shop and why, in a bid to reveal an intersectional map of sorts that represents something of the region's often hidden diversity.
Deviant, Emily Beaney
Deviant, Emily Beaney, 14:12, 2021
Deviant is a film that shares the experiences of a group of women living with endometriosis; the Endo Warriors. To communicate the effects of an illness that is often unseen by others, the women appear in the film traversing a rugged coastline, searching for spaces and sounds that resonate and accommodate their pain and rest. Cycles and unpredictable flares of pain are embodied in the jagged rocks and bodies of water that move with and against them. Sounds and images of eroded land, stagnating pools and surging tides compose the body of this analogue film. The physicality of the 16mm filmstrip and the landscape come together as images are interrupted by the flotsam and jetsam embedded into the film surface.
Images are accompanied by stories of lost friends, lost opportunities, health inequalities and social stigmas. These are told and retold throughout by the Endo Warriors, voicing their distress, but also their relief. As the group come together on screen, they speak to the power of collective care and shared understanding. The women's narratives are drawn to a close after 15 minutes (a timeframe adopted from their medical consults). As Deviant concludes, the Endo Warriors impress upon us the importance of coming together and being heard.
but this is the language we met in, Grounds of Coherence #1, Shen Xin
but this is the language we met in, Grounds of Coherence #1, Shen Xin, 16mm film and DV transferred to UHD, video installation, 12:16, 2023
Protests in regional Mandarin, words for a story in Arabic, and a couple telling myth felt in English, three languages map their movements through relations. What is heard, and what is then given meaning in these connectedness of migratory and loving nature, is paired to forms, and transmitted through possible sounds.
Aerial, Margaret Tait
Aerial, Margaret Tait, 4:00, 1974
Impressions of air, fire, earth and water. Margaret Tait described this film as follows: 'Touches on elemental images ; air, water, (and snow), earth and fire (and smoke) all come in to it. The track consists of a drawn-out musical sound, single piano notes and some natural sounds".
About
Emily Beaney is an artist, filmmaker and PhD researcher. She explores narratives that can be difficult to put into words, focusing upon experiences of embodied difference. Through practices of collective care and creative collaboration, she has created work with communities, artists and researchers. These works have been shared across the UK and internationally, most recently at the Southbank Centre, Talbot Rice Gallery, Glasgow Women’s Library and Mexico City’s Cultural Centre.
Jonathan Thomson and Alison Craighead make artworks that explore the changing socio-political structures of the Information Age. They have been particularly looking at how the digital world is ever more connected to the physical world having become a geographical layer in our collective sensorium. Time and more recently Deep Time, is often treated with a sculptor’s mentality, as a pliable quantity that can be moulded and remodelled.
Eiko Soga is a UK-based Japanese artist and a lecturer, working with moving images, photography, poetry, and installation. Through her interdisciplinary projects, she explores the relationship between emotional and natural landscapes within the more-than-human world. She has completed her practice-led PhD, titled ‘Felt Knowledge: Ecologising Art and Samani Ainu Cooking’ at The Ruskin School of Art in Oxford in 2023. Soga has been showing her works internationally at Pitt Rivers Museum and Modern Art Oxford in Oxford, the Ethnographic Museum in Switzerland, the Ichihara Art Museum in Japan, and IKON Gallery in Birmingham. She is currently a Randall MacIver Junior Research Fellowship in Fine Art at University of Oxford.
Shen Xin is an artist and filmmaker from Chengdu, China, who lives and works in the Isle of Skye, Scotland. Their practice encompasses moving image, installation, performance, sound, and text to explore socio-political and ecological narratives of belonging and migration. Creating environments for immersive storytelling, Shen Xin challenges dominant narratives to propose alternative modes of understanding that are rooted in relation, place, and political agency.
Margaret Tait was born in 1918 in Kirkwall on Orkney, Scotland, Margaret Tait qualified in medicine at Edinburgh University 1941. From 1950 to 1952 she studied film at the Centro Sperimentale di Photographia in Rome. Returning to Scotland she established Ancona Films in Edinburgh’s Rose Street. In the 1960’s Tait moved back to Orkney where over the following decades she made a series of films inspired by the Orcadian landscape and culture. All but three of her thirty two films were self financed. She wrote poetry and stories and produced several books including three books of poetry. - LUX
Collective is a free contemporary art centre that brings creative new perspectives to the city of Edinburgh. Situated in a heritage observatory, Collective develops and presents world-class exhibitions, events, workshops and discussions from ground-breaking local and international artists. We run artist-led activities for young people, as well as the sector-leading development programme for emerging creative practitioners, Satellites. Founded in 1984 as an artist-run initiative, Collective now runs from our home on Edinburgh’s iconic Calton Hill.
