ART PROJECTS

Folktales for New Scots is a nationwide participatory arts programme created by Beetroots Collective CIC and supported by the Creative Scotland Open Fund. The project brings together Scotland’s diverse communities through the shared power of storytelling, printmaking, and collective creativity. Rooted in the belief that every culture carries wisdom and resilience in its stories, the programme invites migrants, refugees, and long‑established residents to explore Scottish folklore while sharing tales from their own homelands. Through this exchange, participants discover common ground and build new connections that strengthen their sense of belonging in Scotland.

In 2026, the project will deliver free storytelling and art workshops across four locations – Edinburgh, Glasgow, Ayr, and Peebles. Each session begins with a traditional Scottish folktale told by a local storyteller and unfolds into hands‑on creative exploration using techniques such as linocut, gelli plate monoprinting, and printing from natural materials. These workshops are designed to be accessible, welcoming, and joyful, supporting people of all ages and backgrounds to express themselves, learn new skills, and connect with others in a safe and inclusive environment.

The artwork created during the workshops becomes the foundation for a collaboratively produced animated film. Participants’ prints, drawings, and textures are digitised and transformed into a vibrant visual narrative that reimagines a Scottish folktale through the lens of Scotland’s multicultural communities.

In early 2027, the final film will be projected outdoors in each participating location as part of free community street events. These winter screenings bring people together during the darkest months of the year, celebrating local creativity, shared stories, and the cultural richness of Scotland’s diverse communities. The events are designed to be warm, welcoming, and accessible, offering a moment of collective pride and joy.

Folktales for New Scots builds on Beetroots Collective’s long-standing commitment to intercultural dialogue, mental wellbeing, and community empowerment. By blending traditional storytelling with contemporary artmaking and digital media, the project creates a space where people can reflect on migration, identity, and home while contributing to Scotland’s evolving cultural landscape. It is a celebration of the stories we carry, the stories we inherit, and the stories we create together.

The hidden history of Edinburgh’s Southside. Learn a new art technique during workshops with artists Marta Adamowicz and Robert Motyka, and create illustrations for a local history exhibition while discussing lore and legends of Edinburgh’s Southside with a historian and Southside resident – Diarmid Mogg. 

The workshops are a great way to get to know the neighbourhood and its dark secrets. They will create bonds within the community, help discover new facts about the nooks and crannies of the Southside, be an excellent excuse to begin ancestral research, and provide a route to discover the history of buildings that are still standing or might have long ago perished.

The project will end in an outdoor exhibition of the stories and participants’ illustrations in the heart of Newington, at the Southside Community Centre.

Diarmid Mogg is a writer and researcher in Edinburgh. He is the author of the websites Tenement Town (tenementtown.com), and the award-winning Small Town Noir (smalltownnoir.com), which tells the life stories of the ordinary people featured in a cache of old mugshots from one small Pennsylvanian town. He is currently writing a non-fiction book about the lives of the people involved in a 1905 murder in a Glasgow tenement.

Partners: The City of Edinburgh Council, Southside Community Centre, Causey Development Trust

Join Beetroots Collective CIC and a storyteller Claire McNicol (LINK) for a series of folktales events with art workshops at Southside Community Centre in Edinburgh.

In these workshops, you will learn how to design and create your own linocut prints. Previous arts and crafts knowledge is not required.

For inspiration on themes, Claire will introduce you to an enchanted world of Scottish myths and folktales.

Beetroots Collective will run 6 art workshops in the Southside Community Centre on a theme of Scottish folklore open to all members of the local community but specifically targeted at immigrants and asylum seekers. We believe that exploring local lore and mythology will help us find commonalities at the roots of our cultures, promoting a feeling of belonging in the New Scots. Meeting with diverse members of the local community will also encourage community ties and intercultural integration.

Each workshop would have a capacity of 20 participants. Artists of Beetroots Collective will transform the artwork from the workshops into an animation, which will be screened at the heart of the neighbourhood as an outdoor projection shown at The Causey. It will give something community-driven and enjoyable to look forward to in the long, dark, and depressing winter months.

Beetroots Collective are ethnically diverse Artists and creatives aiming to promote migrant culture in Scotland.

PARTNERS:

City of Edinburgh Council Community Grand Fund, Awards For All Community Fund and Tasgadh Traditional Arts Small Fund. The Southside Community Centre kindly provides the workshop and exhibition space. The project is also partnered with Causey Development Trust.

*

New Scots is a term used to describe people of any nationality who have immigrated or moved to Scotland. The term has a basis in Scottish Government policy geared towards welcoming refugees and economic migrants and is widely used in modern Scottish media and culture.

City of Freedom is a community-driven art documentary project.

In May 2024 Poland will celebrate the 20th anniversary of joining the European Union. As a follow-up to a successful multimedia project “City of Homes” Beetroots Collective artists would like to create another one with the theme of joining and belonging to the European Union and its values and hopes. The conversation will include how the Polish community feels in post-Brexit Scotland.

Beetroots Collective would like to run several art workshops with the Polish community in various places in Scotland including remote ones. During the art workshops participants will learn how to create linocuts, prints, paper cutouts (wycinanki) and collages and will have informal chats in their first language about their feelings, thoughts and experiences.

During the workshops, participants will also be interviewed on camera. Both interviews and created visual and audio content will be edited and animated into an art documentary film, which will be presented in May 2024 as part of Poland in EU celebrations in Scotland. The film will also be shared with international partners of the project.

Project partners:

• Consulate General of the Republic of Poland in Edinburgh

The APEX award, ‘Does cognition predate life?’, investigates the possibility of there being elementary mind-like properties in complex but non-living chemical systems. We call these mind-like capacities proto-cognition. Using methods from AI, chemistry and philosophy, we want to understand how cognition could have emerged from basic chemical principles. Our research stems from the emerging fields of basal cognition in biology (the study of cognition in basic life forms such as bacteria) and active matter in chemistry (the study of self-organising, nonliving systems). In our public engagement project, we will convey the concepts of proto-cognition, active matter, and self-organisation through specially commissioned video and sound art. Research on active matter and selforganisation produces a range of aesthetically striking and enigmatic phenomena that can be captured in video.

This will form the starting point of artworks to convey various impressions of agency (animacy). In workshops led by the artists, accompanying the exhibition, members of the public will be invited to create their own art exploring these phenomena. Our public engagement proposal draws on research on the perception of animacy given by very minimal stimuli. Such perceptions are normally interpreted as illusions or projections of agency onto an inert substance. Our APEX project raises the more challenging question of whether some complex nonliving systems are not completely inert and inanimate, and by introducing this idea to the general public we wish to start a conversation about our relationship with everyday material objects that we do normally treat as passive and discardable.

Project Partners:  The University of Edinburgh, The Pyramid at Anderston, Glasgow West Housing Association

Festival Program:

Following the successful street event “Where will the flight take us?” Beetroots Collective has been developing another community art project. 

Our Streets’ is a multimedia project about Active Travel and reclaiming urban spaces for pedestrian use. Award winning artists -Marta Adamowicz and Robert Motyka (Beetroots Collective CIC) – in association with Causey Development Trust and Sustrans have worked with the local community to create a stunning spectacle of outdoor projections at The Causey square.

They have organised linocutting workshops where participants created artwork about their favourite forms of active travel and landscapes they like to travel to. The participants’ artwork has then been turned into a short animation that will be displayed on the building of The Causey at 8 pm on the 8th of March.

The event will run in association with Causey Development Trust, Southside Community Centre, Edinburgh Critical Mass, Infra Sisters, Na Przełaj, Living Streets and Buccleuch Free Church turning it into a splendid celebration culminating in a short Sing-a-long version of the song ‘Our Streets’ by Dan Abrahams.

Borscht Film Club is a cultural initiative led by film curator Aga Koperniak – Kerr, developed with the support of coordinators Monika Steć and Marta Adamowicz, and delivered with the organisational backing of Beetroots Collective CIC. It is a community‑driven project dedicated to showcasing the richness and diversity of Polish cinema across Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Each month the club presents a varied programme featuring classic masterpieces, contemporary premieres, children’s films, independent productions, and documentaries. Its mission is to foster cultural exchange, encourage meaningful discussion, and inspire creative collaboration through the shared experience of film.

Every screening includes an online Q&A session, enabling audiences to engage directly with filmmakers, scholars, and industry experts. With support from Film Hub Scotland and the Polish Consulate of the Republic of Poland in Edinburgh, the club continues to expand access to Polish cinema and strengthen intercultural connections.

All films are screened in Polish with English subtitles, offering valuable immersion for Polish‑speaking audiences as well as learners seeking to deepen their language skills in a cultural context. Borscht Film Club collaborates widely—with Samizdat Eastern European Film Festival, Glasgow Women’s Library, Glasgow Doors Open Days Festival, the Scottish Documentary Institute, and others—and hosts screenings in exceptional, fully accessible venues including Pyramid at Anderston, Sharmanka Kinetic Theatre, CCA, Cameo, and Southside Community Centre.

In 2025, Borscht Film Club was recognised at the national community cinema awards, where it received the Single Event Award for its screening of Kill It and Leave This Town by Mariusz Wilczyński at Sharmanka Kinetic Theatre in Glasgow. The club was additionally commended for its programming and acknowledged in the Emerging Community Cinema category, standing alongside Ayr Film Society as one of Scotland’s celebrated winners on the night.

Facebook: LINK

Instagram: LINK

The Polish community in Edinburgh – pupils of Szkoła bez Granic im. Niedźwiedzia Wojtka, girl Scouts of 67 Drużyna Harcerek Regle and adults and families of Cześć! Spotkania po Polsku in the Southside Community Centre created Polish traditional paper cut-outs (wycinanki), which became a decoration for the Christmas event at the French Institute, organised by Łukasz Lutostański, Consul General of the Republic of Poland in Edinburgh.

‘Where Will The Flight Take Us?’ is a community art collaboration project which culminated in a celebrational outdoor street event. Local artists Kate Leiper and Robert Motyka worked with a local school, Preston Street Primary, encouraging the pupils to imagine and draw their own bird. They were inspired by the meaning of birds, both real and imaginary – what they can tell us about ourselves, the environment, community, migration, and climate collapse.

The pupils’ work was digitalised, formed into a short animation along with a soundscape, and then projected on the buildings surrounding the Causey at a public event. The Causey is currently an ugly traffic island but the space was magically transformed with the animations, demonstrating the power of imagination and creativity in place transformation and strengthening community bonds.

We worked with Feniks Counselling, Personal Development and Support Services, Scottish Arab Women Association, Amina the Muslim Women’s Resource Centre, Saheliya, Govanhill Housing Association, Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre to run workshops with minority ethnic women and trans women to talk about what a Scotland free of violence against women and girls would mean for them.

These workshops were a space to explore Scotland free from men’s violence against women and girls by looking at women’s place in traditional fairy tales and how we may rewrite these narratives. Women wrote new fairytales and illustrated them using linocut. Thank you to all the women who shared their experiences and vision for ‘A Scotland free from men’s violence against women and girls’ with us.

by Rachael Disbury, Director, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival

Marta Adamowicz and Robert Motyka’s audiovisual artwork, City of Homes, is an outcome of their residency, in which they worked closely with Polish communities in Edinburgh, as part of Culture Collective. Using sound, interviews, animation, collage and video projection, the work explores and presents lived experiences of migration and complex notions of belonging, while questioning the link between the geography of place and the concept of home. 

Adamowicz and Motyka invited participants to make linocuts of buildings that provoked emotions associated with the word ‘home’. The resulting artworks featured vast and diverse responses, which the artists then worked into an audiovisual live performance, with projection-mapped imagery and a soundscape created from fragments of collected interviews. The result was shown in the Southside Community Centre in Edinburgh, and filmed to create this subsequent moving-image work, which features the added layer of the audience we see in the frame – the participants from whose lived experiences these sounds and images take meaning. 

The vocal fragments included in the piece vary in perspective and interpretation, ruminating on which criteria are relevant to solidify where home is, and conjuring the conclusion that home itself is an expanded and dual concept. Several accounts reflect on the idea that home is inside each of us, multiple and diverse. A hopeful thought for communities in Edinburgh, in any city or town, that our places and populations hold so many homes. 

The formal and conceptual qualities, as well as the gently-paced layering of images and fragmented text, speak to the wider themes of the work – the fluidity of home, the concept of plural identities, the vibrantly collaged nature of community. In the centre of City of Homes’s composition is a door. Among the shifting and changing elements which pull us in various directions throughout the piece, the door is our constant anchor, and reveals the fabric of the community centre in which the participants sit, rooted in that moment to this place. It is a dimension to which the exhibition context at Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival 2023 adds further texture, presenting the work as a projection onto the interior brick of Borders Textile Towerhouse’s barrel vault.

By Iliyana Nedkova, curator

Imaginary Cityscape Once upon a time, an awful pandemic struck the city of Edinburgh. A tiny spiky disruptor caused the closure of Abbeyhill Primary School. However, imaginary and surreal creatures walked past and moved in. Abbeyhill cityscape changed forever – Arthur’s Seat radiated with the colours of the rainbow, swans strolled the streets and bears rode bicycles. The artisan houses were ablaze with multicoloured raindrops and festival banners. Even the world-famous scientist Albert Einstein, albeit in disguise, took residence.

Imaginary Cityscape by Agnieszka Mietkiewicz and Robert Motyka Artists-in-Residence at Abbeyhill Primary School

Illustrated by P7 pupils from Abbeyhill Primary School

Bloody Foreigners isn’t yet another tabloid article – it’s a UK-wide movement aimed at raising awareness of blood donation; promoting a positive image of migrant and ethnic minority groups and demonstrating that they are fully capable of integrating and giving back.

Blood is in high demand and despite the fact that there already are many regular donors more are needed every day. So why not become one? It’s as simple as registering with your local blood centre and donating roughly once every three months.

Join us NOW and help us saving lives! We are Bloody Foreigners, and we know how to give back!

Archive Facebook page: LINK

The Polish-Scottish Heritage aims to promote a greater awareness of Poland and Scotland’s shared heritage. It is especially important now that the Polish community in Scotland is larger than ever before (67 000), to discover those long lasting connections, preserving and celebrating the shared histories of places, events and people for present and future generations.

Youtube Channel: LINK

A series of culinary and cultural events. The events were designed to introduce people to the exciting flavours of Poland while giving them an opportunity to learn more about Polish culture. The series of tasting events were run alongside interesting exhibitions, movie screening and games, as well as with songs for children introducing Polish traditions of Christmas and Polish celebrations like St Andrews day . (audience 500 people)

A series of public lectures and cultural events presenting different aspects of Polish modern culture. Throughout the year, the PCFA showcased Polish contemporary cinema, design, animation, literature, urban design, history and language to a mixed Polish and Scottish audience to stimulate interest and discussion. (total programme audience 1525)