Ghosts in the Machines
One of our unique creative collaborations, showing every night at Hidden Door 2026
Ghosts in the Machines is a roaming physical theatre and performance work featuring animal-like figures emerging from the fragments and residues of The Paper Factory itself.
The Ghosts are not remnants of the past, but figures from an imagined future, moving through the building as if excavating it for meaning. Awoken during last year’s festival, they now return changed, undertaking strange forms of nightly labour as they gather, examine and activate traces of a world they no longer fully understand.
Driven by repetitive rituals and a sense of loss, the Ghosts continue their search through the factory for a missing figure — their lost pigeon companion.
Ghosts in the Machines evolved from Ghost in the Machine, first developed for Hidden Door 2025 by Jill Martin Boualaxai in collaboration with Elvey Stedman, Fiona Oliver-Larkin, Alma Lindenhovus and the Sativa Drummers. Performers for the 2026 work are Elvey Stedman, Fiona Oliver-Larkin and Aimee Mccallum.
About the Creative Collaborations
Threaded throughout the 2026 programme are a series of newly commissioned interdisciplinary collaborations and site-responsive works, waiting to be encountered by visitors as they explore The Paper Factory.
Artists, musicians, poets and performers have joined forces to create something unique for this year’s former factory space. Throughout the festival, recurring works and programme-wide collaborations inhabit the building’s “Last Shift”. Together, they build a shifting portrait of The Paper Factory, both real and imagined, through fragments of its past, present and possible futures.
This year’s festival explores how spaces and objects hold memory, and how traces of everyday activity become preserved, misremembered or reimagined over time.
Audiences will navigate the site as the programme unfolds around them. Unique experiences will be shaped through individual routes, encounters and personal perspectives. No single path will reveal the whole picture as works overlap and unfold throughout the building.
These recurring works and programme-wide collaborations will feature every night of the festival from Wednesday 3rd – Sunday 7th June.
