A Cutting: Stone Portals, Leo Robinson (Ongoing) (EMPIRE LINES Live at SEEDLINGS, The Hunterian)

Find out more about Leo Robinson’s relations to African and Caribbean cosmologies, and worldbuilding through play, with Stone Portals (Ongoing), now part of ⁠⁠SEEDLINGS: Diasporic Imaginaries⁠⁠, curated by Jelena Sofronijevic with Travelling Gallery in Scotland.

The group exhibition, featuring Emii Alrai, Iman Datoo, Radovan Kraguly, Zeljko Kujundzic, Remi Jabłecki, Leo Robinson, and Amba Sayal-Bennett, is touring across Scotland, culminating at Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) in August 2025.

Join Leo Robinson at City Art Centre in Edinburgh on Friday 8 August, where he will guide you through the single-player quest game – also playable collaboratively – which makes a journey through the feeling of longing for a lost home 🎟️edinburghartfestival.com/event/seedlings-stone-portals-gameplay-with-artist-leo-robinson/

Developed through Leo’s current research, Stone Portals explores questions of ritual, ancestry, and migration, aiming to provide often absent archetypal stories to those searching for a sense of diasporic belonging, and worldbuilding through play.

The game appropriates images from postal stamps in St. Vincent and the Grenadines which depict Carnival from the 1970s to the present day. These images, originally created through a fetishistic and idealistic gaze, are recontextualised to construct new narratives and meanings in conversation with ideas about psychoanalysis, tarot, pop culture, and Afrofuturism, as well as the work of black theorists such as Édouard Glissant and Frantz Fanon.

The event is open to all but we encourage attendance by those with connections to histories of migration or who identify as part of a diaspora.

Programmed as part of Travelling Gallery’s current exhibition SEEDLINGS: Diasporic Imaginaries, a group exhibition exploring ways to connect with our worlds through other-than-human perspectives.

For more information, follow Travelling Gallery and EMPIRE LINES on social media, and visit: linktr.ee/SEEDLINGSTG2025

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This cutting with Dominic Paterson comes from a series of EMPIRE LINES events with The Trembling Museum, co-curated with Manthia Diawara and Terri Geis at the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery in Glasgow. The exhibition and public programme ran until 19 May 2024.

Find EMPIRE LINES Live with Leo Robinson at Friday Focus, the Hunterian’s online talks programme, on 11 October 2024: instagram.com/p/DAtbDyUIHzl

Revisit the TREMBLING CONVERSATIONS Symposium at the University of Glasgow on 3 May 2024: instagram.com/p/C6TW0HoINmV/?igsh=MXd0Y3FmZHMzdXh3YQ

And hear exhibition co-curator Manthia Diawara on EMPIRE LINES, recorded live as part of PEACE FREQUENCIES, a 24 hour live radio broadcast to mark International Human Rights Day in December 2023, and 75 years of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Listen back to the recordings with Billy Gerard Frank and Sara Shamma ⁠online⁠, and find all the information in the first Instagram post: .instagram.com/p/C0mAnSuodAZ?img_index=6

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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