Ciarán Wood: The land lit up left her ashtray on the cistern

20 minute presentation for AEROPONIC ACTS  - growing roots in air, DAI's 3 day marathon of lecture-perfomance acts, May 2019.

Returning to a family home that elicits a sense of belonging but simultaneously a sense of removal. A family holiday as moment to be recorded, together in a non-place, in the context of upheaval, a loss of land, labor and rights.

Rachel O’Reilly, Ghalya Saadawi, Laura Harris and Hypatia Vourloumis responded to the question:

What is it to be with history and not live in it?

Report by Ayesha Hameed:

In this three-screen video installation a conversation takes place between a man and a woman in public space, the transcript of which appears on screen. An image of a woman and a kitchen with grass wallpaper is repeated across the screens. There is a lot of black screen time in this precisely paced presentation. A confessional return to the family home is recounted in fragments; minor gestures such as lighting a lighter are punctuated by excerpts from an archive possibly belonging to the maker’s grandmother. The text is fragmented by the background and the many intimate, close-up images, including fragments of wallpaper, fields and wind, accompanied by loud singing. The conversation insinuates a sense of history through small details like how Irish pebbles are used as building materials.  

Ghalya Saadawi was not sure if three screens were needed as the edit and story fragments already gave that feeling. She thought ‘the question about living with history not in it as a basis of inquiry is interesting,’ and that ‘it evokes Walter Benjamin’s work on the fragment, and the flash with which history returns.’ In observing ‘the images themselves seem haunted, without drawing on nostalgia,’ she asked: ‘Is it actually possible to be with history?’ She concluded that ‘the film is a successful attempt to recompose the history for yourself.’

Laura Harris thought it was a ‘complex emotional experience to watch the film,’ the earliest part resonating with Walter Benjamin and Marcel Proust. ‘What does a house mean in the face of forced migration?,’ she asked, which for her brought to mind Gordon Matta-Clark’s cut houses, that were sometimes still warm. ‘Some aspects of this house have that sense,’ she said. She thought the fragments had weight. ‘There are suggested narratives of forced migration coupled with the narrative of being rejected on a personal level,’ she said, noting the move from personal to national histories, a conversation she suggested the artist develop, closing with the question: ‘What connotation does the field hold as it is one of the few images that takes up the whole screen?’ 

Hypatia Vourloumis thought the video presented the sound of sociality and history. ‘It raises the question of representation – whether of text or wallpaper – and so moves outside facile representation,’ she said. ‘There is a resonance between lines on hands, maps, disco lights. It evokes the idea that to touch is to cut. The wallpaper brings to light intimacy and the question of history.’ 

Rachel O’Reilly considered how the thesis explored the aesthetics of nostalgia, and how the artist went with his mother’s occupation of the house and with her family. ‘There is a nice attention to the vernacular that is a fine-grained Brechtian move,’ she said. She saw the video as an attempt to mediate the geopolitics of home. ‘Crediting the Irish archive seemed jarring as the archive is arguably the artist’s as he uses it,’ she said. ‘There is a strong attention to composition and font – the use of caps is successful. The video exploration’s of the idea of localness in art can work in this setting, but also in localities in other parts of the world.’ 

About Ciarán Wood