Firststage Studios was exited to host the final performance of the Edinburgh Arts Festival 2025;
“You feel Bornsick before you understand it. The doors of FirstStage Studios open onto that vast, unheated industrial space down at the Port of Leith, and the first thing that hits you is the scale of it, concrete and steel stretching up into shadow, the kind of room that makes a single body look impossibly small and impossibly exposed at the same time.
Walker, the London-born queer movement artist behind this new work, co-commissioned with Serpentine to close out EAF25, doesn’t so much perform as construct. You watch a body get built in front of you, piece by piece, movement by movement. A shoulder locks into place. A spine curls into some learned, unnatural line. Layer after layer gets added, like watching someone put on a costume made of habit and discipline rather than fabric. By the middle of the piece, what’s standing in front of you barely reads as a person anymore. It reads as a mechanism, precise, relentless, gymnastic in a way that makes your own body ache in sympathy just from watching it.
That’s the gut-punch of Bornsick. It’s asking you to sit with the possibility that none of us arrived as ourselves. We were built too, by family, by institutions, by the diseases and expectations we inherited before we ever got a vote. Watching Walker’s body assembled under those industrial lights, you can’t help but think about your own conditioning, all the ways you learned to hold yourself before you knew you had a choice.
And then, somehow, it starts to come apart. The precision cracks. The layers peel back. What’s left underneath isn’t clean or triumphant, it’s raw, animal, almost embarrassing in its honesty. There’s a moment where you’re not sure if you’re watching a collapse or a birth, and I don’t think Walker wants you to be sure. Through unlearning, we return to the animal, but the piece doesn’t let that feel like an ending. Just as soon as something bare and true seems to emerge, the machine starts rebuilding itself. The cycle begins again. There is no final version of the self waiting underneath all this.
Walking out of FirstStage Studios afterward, into the ordinary evening air of Leith, you found yourself turning over the paradox Walker leaves you with: we spend our whole lives hunting for something real inside us, something essentially ours, and Bornsick’s quiet, devastating suggestion is that everything we are was borrowed from somewhere else. The movements. The behaviours. Even the illness. As a closing note for EAF25, it was a hard, beautiful one, an hour of pure physical stamina that left the room, and me, thinking about what’s actually underneath all our layers, and whether “underneath” is even the right word for it.”
Eleanor Taylor
EAF Curator
