Traumascapes Arts Festival 2025 | Countering erasure and re-archiving survivorhood: Film screening and panel discussion

By utilising creative practice, can we reclaim lost narratives and recentre survivor experience? These artists both used film archives to do just that in ways that are both personal and timely: Wilma explores the re-sounding and re-visioning of trauma in the Scottish Gypsy Traveller archive and Theo explores the colonial film gaze and Palestinian counter narratives. Join us for short films and a Q&A on erasure, agency, resurfacing, and upending power structures.

Including a screening of:

'The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing',  by Theo Panagopoulos

When a filmmaker of Palestinian descent based in Scotland unearths a rarely-seen Scottish film archive of Palestinian wild flowers, he decides to reclaim the footage. This tender film essay questions the role of image-making as a tool of both testimony and violence when connected to entanglements between people and the land. 2024, 17mins

The Force is a meditation on loss, a reckoning with hidden histories, family secrecy and amnesia. Artist filmmaker Wilma Stone gathers what has been discarded—damaged film, fragmented images from home movies and amateur travelogues, and forgotten archival voices, with her own contemporary shot footage and field recordings —and transforms them into a polyphonic dreamscape. Crafting an imaginary world of her hidden ancestral lineage—from the Gypsy Travellers of Scotland—she restitches the torn edges of a history that colonial legacies have sought to unmake. Speaking through gaps, fissures, silences, and elisions, The Force turns remnants of film footage, damaged and corroded by time, into a language of survival that speaks beyond the private to the collective and the political. Inscribed by and in dialogue with historical and psychic traumas, its decay speaks of the slow violence of forgetting, mirroring the way memory corrodes under the weight of neglect. Fragments are arranged not to mend, but to reveal a heritage that refuses to vanish, despite the historical weight of forced assimilation and cultural genocide. The way the images fracture, as they both hide and reveal, reflects the disruption that trauma leaves in its wake. And yet, within this ruin, there is defiance. The Force is an act of reclamation, a bearing witness to what has been lost and what still endures and calls out to us to be made real, to be remembered, and to be named. 2024, 10mins

with Wilma Stone and Theo Panagopoulos, chaired by Julian Triandafyllou

Wilma Stone (she/her)

Wilma Stone is a trans-disciplinary artist who has produced diverse artworks ranging from ceramic sculptures to performance works, to artist films. She was awarded a master’s degree in Sculpture from The Royal College of Art (2018), was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2020), and is now completing a AHRC Techne-funded practice-led PhD at London College of Communication’s Screen School (UAL). During her doctoral studies, Stone has made an award-winning short film The Force (2024) and the experimental artist film Grey Milk & Lost Kin (2025) which uncover a hidden history of forced assimilation and cultural dispossession of Scotland’s Gypsy Traveller people. Her films interweave found footage, archival sound fragments, personal narratives, and poetics, with field recordings and footage shot at her ancestral campgrounds. Navigating family secrecy, memory and personal traumas, Stone’s films reflect on British colonial histories and disavowed cultural, class and racial identities, to find kinship with wider transnational resistance and liberation struggles.

​Theo Panagopoulos (he/him)

Theo Panagopoulos is a Greek-Lebanese-Palestinian filmmaker and researcher based in Scotland. His work explores themes of collective memory, displacement, fragmented identities and archives. He has directed multiple short films that screened in reputable festivals and his most recent film called The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing has won the best short film award at IDFA 2024, Best Short Film Grand Jury Prize at Sundance 2025 and was nominated for a BAFTA. He is currently completing his PhD research on colonial film archives connected to 1930s Palestine.

Julian Triandafyllou (he/they)

Julian trained within the arts, doing his BA at Central Saint Martins, London and his MA at the Edinburgh College of Art working under Emma Davie. His work - mainly moving image, but more recently involving text- has inexplicably explored the nature and experience of living with trauma, but themes also revolve more generally around time, memory, place and language. He has been working as an artist with Traumascapes since 2022 and is delighted to use his experience in facilitating arts and hospitality events as Operations Manager. He is also currently training to become an integrative counsellor with ELOP.

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Festival

The Traumascapes Arts Festival 2025 explores survivorhood through exhibition, film screenings, dance performances, talks, and workshops – all from the perspective of artists and researchers with lived experience of trauma.

See full programme here: https://traumascapes.org/arts-festival

About us

Traumascapes is a survivor-led organisation dedicated to changing the ecosystem of trauma and creating new horizons for survivors through art and science. Our work is bold, disruptive, and caring. It serves trauma survivors (individuals and groups who have been impacted by traumatic experiences such as, but not limited to, violence or abuse), persons and communities who support survivors, & professionals, organisations, and institutions who work on trauma and/or with survivors.

Accessibility

The venue is fully wheelchair accessible with step-free access throughout. An exhibition information pack is available with visual and conceptual descriptions of each artwork. A large-print pack is also available. All films screened as part of the festival include closed captions. Peer support workers and a quiet space with noise cancelling headphones and fidget toys are available on site (see the 'Caring for yourself and others' section below).

If you have any other access needs, please contact Julian and we will do our best to accommodate: julian@traumascapes.org.

Caring for yourself and your community

What to expect

The Traumascapes Arts Festival explores what it means to survive trauma, both individually and collectively. It includes the torment, the joy, and the messiness in between - all from the perspective of artists and researchers with lived experience of trauma. There are mentions/themes of colonialism, systemic violence, childhood and adulthood abuse (sexual, physical, emotional) and neglect, but there are no direct visual depictions of violence or abuse.​

Self and mutual care

It is important to hold space to explore trauma in order to raise awareness and to come together as a community to challenge the status quo and support collective healing. To create change, we must confront the reality of trauma - and this reality is a painful one.

But, as we do so, we must also counteract the normalisation of violence by fostering safety and protecting our wellbeing. As you explore the festival, we invite you to look after yourself and one another. Choose whether and when to engage, how much, and with whom. Step out when you need to and take care of yourself however feels right. Check-in with your peers too.

Support

• Peer support workers will be on site throughout the festival and you can chat to them any time. You can recognise them from their frog badges.

• A quiet space is located on the far end of the venue, on the right, where you can stay as long as you like, whenever you like.

• You can find noise-cancelling headphones, fidget toys, and art materials in the quiet space, which you can use at any time.

• Creative meditation and embodiment workshops are scheduled as part of the festival.

• An audio guide with grounding invitations is available for anyone to use as a way to explore the exhibition accompanied by some gentle grounding practices.

• For additional sources of support, please click here.

We may not be able to avoid all hurt and harm, but we can nurture safety and negotiate trauma with openness, mutual care, empathy, and grace. Thank you for being part of this.