staceyhunteredinburgh-blog

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Local Heroes

Local Heroes has taken off ✈️!

Local Heroes: Scottish Design at Edinburgh Airport 1—31 August 2016

Local Heroes is an exhibition that I am curating that will present contemporary Scottish design culture to a public audience. 

Local Heroes redefines contemporary Scottish design by bringing together Scotland’s leading designers in an exhibition developed specially for Scotland’s Year of Innovation, Architecture and Design.

The exhibition features exciting new commissions which explore the notion of the souvenir and the theme of travel. Installed at Edinburgh Airport during the largest cultural festival in the world — The Edinburgh Festival — Local Heroes will be accessible to a predicted 1.2 million passengers spanning 120 international destinations.

One of the most exciting things about Local Heroes is the opportunity to partner with Edinburgh Airport, Creative Edinburgh and Creative Dundee - a truly innovative and creative group of people!

Follow the project on Twitter at https://twitter.com/LocalHeroesScot and Instagram https://www.instagram.com/localheroesdesign/

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Research Trip to Pakistan

In March I was invited by Craft Scotland and the British Council Pakistan to participate in a truly exceptional research trip to Lahore, Pakistan. Along with Craft Scotland’s director Fiona Logue and Scottish designers Andy Robertson and Jennifer Kent (Edition Scotland) we were guided around this amazing city’s craft scene by Abdullah Qureshi.

We were introduced to local craft organisations such as the Daachi Foundation  and Thaap as well as the incredible facilities at the Pakistan Institute of Fashion and Design.  A craft residency project between Pakistan and Scotland is now being explored by Craft Scotland. 

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Year of Innovation, Architecture and Design 2016

Local Heroes: Scottish Design at Edinburgh Airport is a self-initiated design project that I am curating at Edinburgh Airport.

Local Heroes is a pop-up design exhibition, shop and event hub that will celebrate and showcase the excellence of Scottish design through a world-class display and embedded events programme. A partnership with Edinburgh Airport, Creative Edinburgh and Creative Dundee, Local Heroes will promote Scotland’s most important contemporary designers and makers nationally and internationally.

https://www.visitscotland.com/about/themed-years/innovation-architecture-design/

@LocalHeroesScot

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City Link Festival 2015: Copenhagen & Edinburgh

I was invited to direct the annual City Link Symposium which this year was linking Copenhagen and Edinburgh with the theme of Democratic Renewal. I’ve got lots of social and research-related links with Denmark and I’m very interested in urban citizenship so it’s been great to work with GivRum, a Copenhagen-based urban renewal organisation. It was wonderful to see it all come together at Summerhall on the 25th of September and each of these inspirational talks are available to watch online over at CityLink.

My colleague and co-editor at The New Met Richard J Williams has a written a neat summary of the symposium’s themes and speakers over here and the brilliant photos are by Savan Panchal.

It was exciting to include a series of four afternoon activities that were designed to take people out of the conference environment and into and across the city. We organised a City Activist workshop with Akiko Kobayashi, a tour of Leith’s murals and street art by LeithLate, a seminar about the Right to the City in Hamburg and a digital and temporal investigation of the Old Town by ECA’s Design Informatics head Chris Speed. Here’s a snapshot...

Archive information is at the City Link website here

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Postdoctoral Fellowship

I’ve just taken up a four-month residence at IASH in Hope Park Square, the most picturesque location imaginable on the University of Edinburgh Campus. My Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities is in pursuit of a research project titled:

Towards a model for the co-production of the city: an ambitious urban citizenship scoping project in Leith

Read more about it here 

I’ll be participating in events relating to the Institute’s research and public engagement activities and one that I’m helping to curate is an online exhibition titled Lost+Found in Edinburgh featuring images of the city’s contested and abandoned places.

View from the roof terrace garden at National Museum of Scotland by Magnus Hagdorn on Flickr Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The exhibition will be hosted by The New Metropolitan and features the city’s vacant spaces, ruins and urban quirks. All are welcome to participate in a lively discussion with humanities researchers, architects, creative practitioners and the city’s residents to dissect what it means to inhabit Edinburgh today. By grounding our imagination and lived experience in humanities research, they will explore the often ignored divisions across Edinburgh, thereby responding to the contradictions and inequalities of contemporary urban citizenship.

Part of Being Human: a festival of the humanities. Tickets here

@BeingHumanFest @IASH_Edinburgh @new_met @StaceyHunterEDI

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Director of City Link 2015 Congress Programme

I’m delighted to be working with the good people at Copenhagen based organisation Givrum on this year’s City Link Festival. As Director of the City Link Symposium 2015 I’ve helped to create a special event on the theme of Democratic Renewal that celebrates cities and the people and activity that shape them. We have brought together speakers who in different ways have studied, considered, altered or impacted the urban environment.

Our one day symposium will be held on Friday 25th September, commencing at Summerhall for a morning of talks, and an afternoon of workshops in various locations across the city.

The morning programme will feature speakers from Scotland, Denmark, the US, Germany and the Netherlands. Christoph Lindner, Professor of Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam, where he writes about cities, visual culture, and globalization, will present Retro-Walking New York: Slow Urbanism. He uses New York City's High Line elevated park as a case study to explore how slowness - as both an aesthetic experience and a spatial practice - is increasingly being used to enable the neoliberal development of the global city.

Signe Brink Pedersen, Denmark, will bring her experiences of curating Dream City at Roskilde Festival to Edinburgh. Signe will present how temporary art and architecture might be used to catalyse development with playful approaches in urban contexts.

Other speakers include US-based artist and urban interventionist Jason Roberts, Copenhagen based Architect and urban designer Kristoffer Kamp Theisen,  creative producer and Director of Creative Edinburgh Janine Matheson and Director of Festivals Edinburgh Faith Liddell.

Those attending the symposium can also participate in afternoon site visits around Edinburgh: City ‘hacktivist’ Jason Roberts will join Akiko Kobiyashi on the Union Canal for a hands-on workshop on DIY Urbanism; LeithLate will give a tour of local Leith murals and street art; Tech hub CodeBase will host a digital mapping workshop led by Edinburgh College of Art’s Chris Speed using smartphone technology to map the ‘time of the city’ and Hamburg based activist and artist Till Haupt will give an insight in to his work in grassroots urban activism and politics.

City Link connects cultural communities across Europe to meet and share ideas on how we can make fairer and more democratic cities – knowledge sharing on the international fluxes of democratic urban development. Each year City Link connects two new cities together, and celebrates this connection in a festival. Through the City Link initiative, we aim to promote international collaboration and connect cultural communities beyond the institutional frameworks, enabling anyone to exchange ideas, collaborate and inform how their city could develop in a fair and democratic way.

city-link.org

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Research Fellowship at IASH

Postdoctoral Bursary and Research Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH). I’ll be taking up the position in Autumn/Winter 2015/16 to pursue a research project titled: 

Towards a model for the co-production of the city: an ambitious urban citizenship scoping project in Leith

I’ll also be participating in events relating to the Institute’s research and public engagement activities. IASH are based at The University of Edinburgh and believe that it is interdisciplinary research and dialogues between scholars of different backgrounds which will open up new spaces for research in the future. They offer a space where critical thinking can be free to go beyond the traditional compartmentalisations and cross disciplinary boundaries, in a spirit of innovation and experimentation.

Professor Jo Shaw, Director of IASH said "Postdoctoral Research Fellowships at IASH are highly competitive—just 13% of applications received in the 2015/2016 application round were being offered a place. As part of Dr Hunter's Fellowship she will be playing an active role in enhancing IASH’s public engagement activities (with a focus on urban citizenship and the Being Human Festival) and building further links with creative and grassroots partners across Edinburgh."

The Institute runs a full programme of events throughout the year and information about the Institute and its activities is available on the IASH website: http://www.iash.ed.ac.uk/.

Follow @StaceyHunterEDI and @IASH_Edinburgh

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The New Metropolitan

I’m the co-editor of The New Metropolitan a web-magazine about new cultures of urban citizenship. Working with a network of researchers from Sarajevo to Lisbon I commission content and oversee design and social media.

Join the conversation here | Tweet us @new_met | Our Facebook page is here.

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Our first public event: hello world :D

A public event for The New Metropolitan magazine:

Christoph Lindner presents Amsterdam, Street Art & Super-Gentrification

An evening of discussion about urban citizenship that takes as its focus Christoph Lindner’s observations about Amsterdam, Street Art & Super-Gentrification.

https://lindner.eventbrite.com

Lindner asks “What happens when art in public spaces strategically decelerates, disrupts, or even stops movement, flow, and interaction in the global city?”

This unique event considers some of the unexpected ways in which artistic attempts to foster hospitality and belonging at a community level can produce new, subtle forms of exclusion and false intimacy.

Our guest panel will discuss some of the themes arising with a post-lecture debate; panelists include Edinburgh artist Fraser Gray, Professor of Contemporary Visual Cultures Richard J Williams and Cultural Geographer Rowan Ellis.

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New Studio

I'm delighted to be part of the first wave of designers resident at Hill Street Design House.

A townhouse in Edinburgh's New Town, Hill Street hosts eight elegant studios, over four floors, which are filled with designers working in interiors, graphics, illustration, fashion and jewellery (see our Residents). I'm in Studio 7 with Martin Baillie, Janine Matheson and Jaco Justice.

We also have a front room available to hire and a Photography Studio. Hill Street is managed by the tenacious and talented Jenny Hazel.

Tweet to @3HillStreet  and Facebook us here.

This is Thelma, our enthusiastic receptionist.

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Curatorial: SCOTLAND CAN MAKE IT! Events

Images from each of the Scotland Can Make It! events.

The links below take you to each individual event on the project website:

Shop at Southblock

The Golden Tenement Talk

Baltic Street Adventure Playground

Launch of the Great Circle App with FOUND

Home / Away Introduced

An Evening Swim with Atelier E.B.

Jelly Tasting with Ivan Day

Photos by Eoin Carey

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Curatorial: Scotland Can Make It! Further information

At the beginning of 2014 I was commissioned by Panel to curate their events programme for Scotland Can Make It! 

I developed six sold-out events, each celebrating the intelligent and beautifully realised designs for souvenirs made entirely in Scotland.

The elegant graphic design for the project was done by long-time collaborators��Graphical House.

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Research: New Dialogues is a funded research project I am co-producing for Creative Edinburgh

The research will provide Creative Edinburgh with an in-depth analysis of the core value of its services to its membership and connected industries. 

I'm pleased to be partnering up with Ealasaid Munro, an academic with a particular interest in the cultural and creative industries and Creative Edinburgh's director Janine Matheson.

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Writing: Book Chapter for Scotland 44

The book features 12 chapters each focusing on a different idea of how Scotland can develop over the next 30 years.

My chapter is about architecture and urbanism and is titled Scotland's Ambiguous Urbanism. I spoke at the book launch - part of the Edinburgh Book Fringe at the radical Word Power Bookstore.

Co-authors are: 

Vonny Moyes, Kirsteen Shields, Dominic Hinde, Lee Bunce, Peter Matthews, Oliver Escobar, Jacq Kelly, Ellen Young, Patrick Harvie, Andy Summers, Laurie MacFarlene ISBN: 9780993000409

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Production: Mr Porter Magazine

I produced a one-day shoot in Edinburgh for fashion magazine Mr Porter which featured the artist and playwright John Byrne. 

The delightful crew were assembled by Location Scotland.

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Production: Vogue Russia

I produced a three-day shoot for Vogue Russia which featured a crew  assembled by Location Scotland.

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Stylist

I styled this photo shoot for Edinburgh based designer/maker Namon Gaston. The photography is by Stuart McClay and I was excellently assisted by Jessica Taylor.

We were very fortunate to have 'Hope House' as our location, which featured in Grand Designs. Many of the props I used were in-situ and the house is beautifully appointed.

I used a unique combination of Danish midcentury modern lighting, Czech glassware, Finnish animal skins and vintage 1950s British tableware. This combined with the architecture of Hope House and its surrounding landscape, resulted in the eclectic, multilayered shots we had envisaged.