Publics Residency

Artist and filmmaker Bojan Fajfrić joined us from the Netherlands from May – August 2025 for the second iteration of our Publics Residency, in partnership with Mondriaan Fund.

Bojan’s practice explores the mundanity of history, which although is often recounted as “heroic exploits”, generally takes form in day-to-day life through nostalgia, anecdotes, absences and renunciations. Informed by his experience of growing up in Yugoslavia, he is interested in how moving image can create distance from the past and other places, acting as documentation of events as they unfold in personal and collective memories.

On residency, Bojan started by researching personal archives, memories, stories and footage of Huntly. Through a weekly film club and our regular home programme events, he invited anyone with an interest in Huntly’s (recent) histories and/or filmmaking, to join him in exploring the porous relationship between memory and the moving image.

From a talk at Friday Lunch, to a open studio event at Huntly Market, seven collaboratively programmed Film Clubs to meetings with Huntly experts and community members, his research started to follow connections between Huntly and the wider world, tracing the movement of people and objects, stories and memories. Centering around the old museum in Huntly, Bojan started to explore what this space held and what it came to represent. Visiting the museum store in Mintlaw led to collaboration with the team there, considering the complexity of objects within their care, the tensions between preservation and access, and the relationship of these objects and ideas to collective identity.

The film created by Bojan Fajfrić and his collaborators through residency is currently in post-production.

Image credit: Jamie Cutts & Bojan Fajfrić, 'Huntly Beggars' Badge' at Aberdeenshire Council Museum Service (2025)