“Attis In Caledon”
Harry Josephine Giles and Callie Rose Petal (ⁿᵒᵗBorges)
TX: Thursday, 10 September⋅6:00 – 6:15pm
Saturday, 12 September⋅12:45 – 1:00pm
This experimental Scots translation of Catullus 63 tells the story of a young athlete driven mad by the Mother Goddess, driven to become an orgiastic priestess in the wild mountain woods, in a cacophonous reimagining of the Latin classic as a trans hymn to the Caledonian Forest. “Attis in Caledon” uses the full force of Scots to create a contemporary version of galliambic metre, the ancient poetic form of Cybele’s centuries-long trans priesthood, and the poetry is complemented by original music and archival material woven together into a new work of noise alchemy. We ran through the ancient pines of Coille Choire Chuilc in the foothills of Beinn Os to bring you this magic.
Words and Performance by Harry Josephine Giles, Music and Sound Design by Callie Rose Petal (ⁿᵒᵗBorges)
Harry Josephine Giles is a writer and performer from Orkney, living in Leith. Her latest book is the poetry collection Them! (Picador 2024). Her verse novel Deep Wheel Orcadia (Picador 2021) won the 2022 Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction book of the year. Her poetry collections The Games (Out-Spoken Press, 2018) and Tonguit (Freight Books 2015) were between them shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Saltire Prize and the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award. Her stage show of her poetry sequence Drone toured internationally in 2019, and the performance of Deep Wheel Orcadia toured in 2025. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Stirling.
Callie Rose Petal is a multidisciplinary conceptual artist and semiotician. Her experimental praxis spans noise composition, durational performance and ritual installation, software development, language art, and mixed media visual works in an immersive amalgamation of personal mythopoesis. Her work engages distortive breakdown as compositional force. As in her broader conceptual multiverse of Lexicomythography, loss, grief, and otherness emerge as structural generators of affect and form. Her work is informed by her lived experience as a disabled trans woman and trauma survivor.
