Berwick-upon-Tweed is sited in historically and famously contested land, set hard by the border between the English and the Scots and changing hands between the two nations some 14 times. That location has made it a garrison town, one given massive, state-of-the-art Venetian-Empire-style fortifications in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and an imposing barracks, designed by the great architect Nicholas Hawksmoor, in 1717-21, two decades before the “Forty Five” and Bonnie Prince Charlie’s legendary march south in his failed attempt to restore the Stuart monarchy to England in 1745.

A new community-based film, Parade (2025), by the London-based artist Matthew Rosier, is showing for three nights only this weekend, celebrating the town’s diverse 21st-century community and its historic barracks (for some years decommissioned and home to the town museum) by projecting the film onto the massive walls of its parade ground, depicting community groups—youth theatre, football teams, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution volunteers, veterans of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, pipers and dancers—march by in turn in all their colourful variety.

The Parade project has been commissioned by Berwick Shines, The Living Barracks Cultural Engagement programme. The film’s performances come just as English Heritage prepares to embark on building works with partners including the King’s Own Scottish Borderers (once based at the barracks and due to reopen their museum there in 2027), the Maltings Trust and Northumberland County Council to develop the barracks into a cultural hub with a modern, purpose-built gallery and exhibition spaces.

A history in community film-making

Over several days’ filming in early February, in mixed weather, much of it arriving bracingly off the North Sea, a wide variety of groups strutted their liveried and uniformed stuff for Rosier and his team on location at the barracks. Rosier made the film in collaboration with what he describes as a “particularly amazing production” team from the Maltings arts centre. The final version of the film is being projected on to the barracks walls, around three sides of the parade ground, at ten times life size.

Rosier has a track record in filming with British communities, pulling together their collective stories. He tries, he tells The Art Newspaper, “to get a representative selection of people from that community and to get to know different groups and people and then creating a [filming process] that gets projected back into the town”.

His first such project was in Macclesfield, in Cheshire, where, he says, he made “a projection on a staircase through the middle of the town. And people came out to see essentially a week in the life of that staircase. And it was quite astonishing how people responded just to seeing a replaying of people and character because it turns everyday life into a kind of filmic experience, which was quite lovely to see.” For another project, at Pontefract in Yorkshire, the film was projected “on to trees and transforming people into trees … and that was more narrative driven”.

The scale of Rosier’s projects has been increasing over time. “With these projects, he says, “it’s always how do you become representative and it’s ultimately about creating a situation where people are aware of what’s happening and then they feel it’s accessible and they feel like they are truly invited to be part of it. And also that it’s an exciting prospect.”

At Berwick, Rosier and the Maltings team ran “information days …we’d present the project over and over again, and loads of people came. And the idea was that people would come … [and] disperse the message more widely. And then we had a couple of months to get the schedule in place for the filming days.” Ultimately the filming involved 800 people, or nearly 10% of the town’s population.

Come the filming days, Rosier put down the relaxed atmosphere to the community groups’ enthusiasm and to working with the choreographer Chloe Smith, who is from Berwick. “That was an important part of the proposal,” he says, which he pitched in an open call. “That I would work with a local choreographer so that I can be directing in the background, making sure everything’s as it should be [while she is] there at the forefront making people feel comfortable and have fun.”

Laser-projected performance

For the three evenings when the film is shown at the parade ground, the audience will stand and the team will use 11 projectors—”very punchy laser projectors”, Rosier says—mounted on small towers placed centrally through the parade ground, in the middle of the audience.

Before his move into making films for and about community, Rosier trained in architecture. He was, he says, “quite interested in technology and more interested in the public space part of design rather than the building part of design.” What he discovered through public art in particular, he says, “is a way of creating experiences that bring people together”.

He is interested in altering the environment “in a way that is relatively light touch”. Projecting his community films is, he says, a perfect example of that. “Because you don’t need really anything there on the ground, it just transforms, it’s like magic. And I think that’s when technology is at its most powerful, when it does feel like magic.”

“It was just transforming one environment into something else,” he adds. “Transforming the barracks into a giant parade, transforming trees into people, transforming a staircase into its past memories of itself. and that’s always how I’ve looked at it.”

One more take

Back on the parade ground for the penultimate day of shooting in early February, Rosier is behind the camera and Chloe Smith is preparing a junior football team and their coaches, watched on by warmly clad parents—well schooled in the seasonal weather by countless Saturday afternoons on chilly midwinter touchlines—for a third take. It is in the third take that Smith hopes to get each group almost dancing.

And with that last dancing take, the town of Berwick knows that it has come one step closer—before Rosier embarks on a two-and-a-half-week sprint of post-production—to witnessing its daily life, and its varied communities, projected back on the town’s historic barracks walls as a filmic experience.

Ten times life size.

• Parade, Berwick Barracks Parade Ground, Berwick-upon-Tweed, 28 February, 1 March and 2 March.