The stories brought joy, nostalgia and even a little fear. On a cold, sunny Wednesday afternoon in Aberdeen’s city centre, I spoke with locals about the decades-long abandoned indoor swimming complex, the Bon Accord Baths, an Art Deco treasure in the heart of Scotland’s “Granite City.” The space is a marvel, but my only initial reference to it, prior to walking into the facility, was the Wikipedia description that it was “recognized as one of the most significant surviving indoor swimming pools of the interwar period in the UK.” So I needed some stories.
What locals remembered was a freedom of youth, the pain of adolescence, the fear of something unknown. I was told stories about being dropped off on summer mornings only to be picked up later in the afternoon by parents, color wristbands to indicate when you were allowed and allocated to swim, the tragedy of a death on the high dive that no one could confirm and could be an urban legend. It was the first time some saw public nudity in the bathrooms, the first time they got a crush, or, and this was a wide-theme, the first time they conquered the fear of reaching the deep end of the pool. Because of the high dive, the deep end of the Bon Accord Baths was especially intimidating, 15-feet deep and part of nearly 120-foot long lanes. People mentioned that the fear of the unknown shaped them, and opened up a rite of passage once successfully traversed. The deep-end isn’t so scary after all.
I was on assignment at Nuart Aberdeen to interview Robert Montgomery, the Scottish-born, England-based artist and poet who had just completed an installation in the pool as part of the festival’s “poetry in the streets” theme. Montgomery was known for using poetry as his visual language in both public spaces and institutions, using light, paint, fly posters, murals and installations. “Are you an artist or a poet? Is this art or is this poetry? What is it?,” Montgomery once said to me was the common question he faces, but what is apparent is the text is his medium for which he is most known for.
For Nuart, Montgomery was going to reclaim the memory of a place, give the space a language and give it back to the town, even if for a few days. In collaboration with Nuart founder, Martyn Reed, the 11-meter text and light structure, Even After All This Time the Sun Never Says to the Earth “You Owe Me”, would be accompanied by local choirs to activate the space in a way that had never been done. And literally, placed in the deep-end of the pool, a poem that serves a welcoming and love letter to migrants, I couldn’t help but see how this placement a conquering of unfounded fears.
Reed sent me a few messages before I interviewed Montgomery, one from Palestinian writer and poet Mahmoud Darwish who said "All beautiful poetry is an act of resistance.” I was thinking that in regards to Montgomery’s work here, its resistance to not only to far-right, anti-immigrant policy, but also a resistance to lose a collective history. It’s a space, place, an event, an art piece, a poem, a gathering, and with the choir, almost a non-denominational prayer. It’s resisting definition and time.
Then there was American poet Rebecca Lindenberg’s thoughts on writing that felt connected here. She writes “I think there is a general misconception that you write poems because you ‘have something to say.’ I think, actually, that you write poems because you have something echoing around in the bone-dome of your skull that you cannot say… The ‘unsayable’ thing at the center of the poem becomes visible to the poet and reader in the same way that dark matter becomes visible to the astrophysicist.”
What was unsayable here was both what we lose and what we can gain together. Montgomery’s work carves a path between a world of text and signage that often just tell us where to go, what to do, what to buy, how to look, what you can’t go, what you can’t do. His work gives you another option, which is pause and remember yourself and the empathy for others. To experience the world, not be controlled by it. Even if you get that for one night, the memory can last a lifetime. —Evan Pricco
