Changing Places is a series of events and exhibitions showing contemporary artists’ video within historic buildings across the country.

As part of the nationwide tour, Whaley Bridge Transhipment Warehouse will temporarily open to host a large-scale video projection positioned above the water of the Peak Forest Canal. The featured film is Residue by artists Desire Machine Collective, which foregrounds attitudes towards preservation. It depicts a different architectural space that was once at the heart of industrial activity - the decaying, forgotten structure of an abandoned power station outside the artists’ hometown of Guwahati in India. Without the will for its preservation or repurposing, the power plant is becoming slowly engulfed by the nature that surrounds it.

Viewed within this listed warehouse as it sits on the brink of several possible futures, the transformation of the power station becomes even more pertinent. But with the process of abandonment comes a different kind of regeneration, or new beginning - not for the benefit of humans, but for the other species that have begun to inhabit the building.  By revealing the crumbling architecture, the burgeoning greenery and the life cycle of the resident insects, Residue forms a poetic reflection on the cycle of creation and destruction. Here in the Transhipment Warehouse, nature has also begun to take advantage and the building has become home to a number of bird and insect species, as well as a feeding and resting place for brown long eared bats and pipistrelles.

Image: Residue (film still) Desire Machine Collective.