Hidden Door are delighted to confirm that the 2025 festival will take place from Wednesday 11 to Sunday 15 June 2025. The announcement follows a successful venue launch party last month. The November event showcased a fraction of the site, featuring live music, visual art installations and pop-up performances. The June 2025 festival will open up yet more of this huge site making use of the various warehouses, factory floors, offices and outhouses. Throughout the year, the site will also be transformed into a creative hub featuring studio, workshop and community spaces. Creatives are now being invited to register their interest in being involved in the 2025 programme, with a full call for proposals opening soon. Creatives can register their interest in being involved in this unique event, with a full call for proposals opening soon for site-specific commissions. Full details can be found on their website at www.hiddendoorarts.org
Hazel Johnson, Festival Director of Hidden Door, said:
“We were delighted to open up a small section of The Paper Factory for our venue launch event, giving audiences a first glimpse of our new home. We’re now looking ahead to 2025, and over the coming months the transformation will continue, opening up more of the vast industrial site and filling every corner with our most ambitious programme yet.
In the lead up to the festival we’ll also be creating workshop, studio, rehearsal and community spaces to make the most of this amazing space. We exist to support the creative community and to connect audiences with emerging artists, and this latest venue will be at the heart of delivering that in 2025. We look forward to welcoming you to The Paper Factory.”
The Paper Factory is located in the Maybury Quarter, a 15.5-acre site occupied by the former Saica paper and cardboard manufacturing facility on the western edge of Edinburgh. The site features a mix of warehouses, factory floors, offices and outhouses. Bounded by the Edinburgh Gateway tram and rail station, there are excellent transport links to the city centre as well as to Glasgow and the west.
Hidden Door will transform the entire site for a full-scale multi arts festival. The property has been empty since Saica’s relocation to a purpose-built facility in Livingston. Regeneration specialists Summix Capital are now developing proposals for the future of the site, and have offered Hidden Door access until the end of 2025.
Stuart Black, Development Director for Summix Capital, said:
“We would like to congratulate Hidden Door for its fantastic launch event and cannot wait until the main Festival in June. As an organisation, we have been proud to support Hidden Door through making this unique space available to them and the creative community they have built.
Our vision is for Maybury Quarter Edinburgh to be one of the most exciting and best-connected development sites in Scotland, and we’re really excited to see what plans Hidden Door’s artists have in store to transform this site into a vibrant creative hub”.
Jill Martin Boualaxai, Creative Lead, said:
“Our 2025 festival program, titled ‘The Building as a Myth,’ invites artists to collaboratively develop ambitious multidisciplinary projects. Guided by the overarching concepts of Transformation and Reclamation, Time and Memory, Rituals and New Narratives, and Feminisation and Reimagining the Space, the programme encourages exploration of how industrial spaces can be reclaimed by nature, layered with temporal narratives, and reimagined as inclusive, symbolic environments.
An open call will welcome submissions across various disciplines, including visual art, dance, moving image, spoken word, music and performance, inviting work that resonates with these themes. With access to The Paper Factory for the whole of 2025, we have a unique opportunity to collaborate, experiment, and fully engage with the building’s unique history and character, promising an immersive multi-arts experience for our audience.”
For more information on Hidden Door please check the website and facebook.
A limited release of Early Bird tickets is now live at www.hiddendoorarts.org/tickets
