Ghosts in the Machines

Ghosts in the Machines was a co-created roaming performance presented as five happenings within the imagined world of The Last Shift at The Paper Factory during Hidden Door Festival 2026.

The work evolved from Ghost in the Machine (2025), in which three animal-like figures, a Pigeon, a Kestrel and a Cat, awoke among the factory’s abandoned machinery. When one of the original performers was unable to return in 2026, that absence became central to the new work. The Kestrel and the Cat were now searching for their missing Pigeon companion and friend, while a new creature, the Rat, entered their changing mythology.

The Ghosts are not remnants of the factory’s past, but figures from an imagined future. Moving through the building, they gather, examine and activate the surviving traces of a world they no longer fully understand. Tools, signs, materials and machines become clues. Repetitive tasks become rituals, while their nightly labour becomes part investigation, part reconstruction and part search.

Rather than occupying a single installation, the Ghosts travelled purposefully through the factory. They appeared as workers, attendants and uncertain guides, following marked routes and moving between machinery, accumulations of objects and temporary sites of memory and offering. They rarely acknowledged the audience directly, but their journeys created unexpected encounters throughout the building.

The five happenings unfolded across the wider festival programme, sometimes overlapping with the rhythms and movement of the Sativa Drummers. Appearing and disappearing across the site, the Ghosts connected different spaces and events while continuing their search for the figure who was no longer there.

Credits

Conceived and led by Jill Martin Boualaxai

Co-created and performed by Elvey Stedman, Fiona Oliver-Larkin and Aimée McCallum

Presented within The Last Shift, Hidden Door Festival 2026

With the Sativa Drummers