Community engagement was a key part of our interpretation of the brief and our plans for the project. The initial idea for events would focus on Winnie Herbstein and Lucas Priest. Our planning had featured a workshop Winnie Herbstein has been working on and already run several times, Sweat Equity, in conjunction with a walk by the School of Pedestrian Culture led by Lucas Priest. We had debated having them as parts to a singular event or even running them multiple times. This original idea influenced the way we proceeded with the events associated with the exhibition.
Through the events associated with the exhibition we hoped to expand on the themes from the exhibition itself as well as make a meaningful connection with the visitors. We also hoped to use a part of these events as a way to kickstart the display for the living archive aspect of the exhibit. This idea led us to working with Joey Simons and Keira McLean to run a workshop centering on the question ‘what does your dream home look like?’ This workshop ended up being more complicated than we had originally planned as the venues and community centers we contacted were not getting back to us. This ended up being resolved as my colleague Sophia had previous connections with the Community Wellbeing Collective, and they were generous enough to work with us on the workshop as well as allowing the display of the results in the exhibition. The format for the walk by the School of Pedestrian Culture led by Lucas Priest, which focused on studentification, faced changes from the original idea. This walk became a singular, stand-alone event as it became clear that the ideal date for this would be while the Traveling Gallery was centrally in Edinburgh. Winnie Herbstein’s workshop, Sweat Equity, did not end up being run. This decision came about due to a number of factors, but one of the largest was budget; the cost to run the workshop conflicted with the number of other aspects of the project that had come about. The decision was then made to ask Winnie Herbstein to participate in a Q&A film night which was hosted at the Edinburgh Student Housing Cooperative by Queer Film Night, looking into her works Minutes (2019) and Studwork (2018), that were not explicitly part of the exhibition.
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