An-atomic Narrative - Whatever Survives
2005, Moore Street, Dublin
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An-atomic Narrative - 25 minute video portrait of Moore Street ( the video is currently in storage and will be linked as soon as possible )
I intitiated this project with Fire Station Artists Studios in 2004 because of the street’s ongoing transformation from a traditional European market into a multi-cultural miasma of new businesses, shoppers, clientele and customers. This burgeoning in Moore Street was been facilitated by a time bubble emerging from contentions about what it might soon be replaced by.
Whatever Survives is shot hand-held below eye level with the idea of capturing the goings on and lower surfaces of the street as well as the inside of the buildings that used to be accessible to the public. The cracked, worn, peeling and grubby surfaces overlaid with forgotten, left or discarded objects can divulge a kind of city animal – ‘the skin of the beast’ that exhibits its own story, and shows its real face. I have tried not to homogenise the street, more to submerge my work in its basic state of flux and glean an essence from noting peripherals and trajectories of the myriad of individuals and communities that use this place as a source of survival or as a thoroughfare.
The street positively flourishes as an economic glitch and anomaly at the bottom of the economic food chain. There are numerous parallels that can be drawn with other natural selection processes that exist on every level of an eco-system both plant and animal from microscopic organisms through to the human socio-economic scale. Whatever Survives is about how humans (similar to other life forms) survive against all odds in unusual environments and constantly adapt to and take advantage of changing circumstances. The name also pertains to both the imminent erasure of this multi-faceted street ‘organism’ that tenaciously clings on in 2009 and to whatever survives.
The video starts with seeing the ‘traditional’ street and refers to the ‘Potemkin Village’. Then the recent influences converge and we see the interiors of new businesses in the now condemned buildings that line the street – these were not accessible to the public until internet cafes, hairdressers, restaurants etc opened up off the labyrinth of halls and stair wells. The third part is a stills portrait of the street at present, including the signs prohibiting entrance to these buildings and applications for planning permission.
Then a different reason for the lowered gaze emerged. Despite half of the buildings being condemned recently, Moore Street is still tightly packed with people continuing to open businesses in every nook and cranny possible. Its anatomy, though incredibly vibrant with traditional and new markets jostling, is extremely sensitive and quite segregated. Diverse communities inter-oven with secrets, scams and dodges, fronts and interdependancies, its connective tissue is made of easily provoked intensities. It is an in-between, kaleidoscopic collection of territories that have been precarious for so long. By just holding a camera - I was looked on as holding a kind of weapon. Depending on the angle, this was read by the traders as either threatening or innocent and they were always on guard.
The camera’s averted gaze is part of the language of the street. It sees the wear and tear, palimpsests and layers that tell a story of the many occupants of the space over time. Whatever Survives is an archive of close-up aerial views anatomising this zone of deviation where all the rules are akimbo and everything is up for grabs.
All the traders on Moore Street govern micro-territories of supply and demand, the street can be defined as sets of segments and activities. My challenge lay in devising an empathetic visual experience of this. I developed a camera language that merges with the textures and flow of activity as an approach to reading this thriving and entropic market street. My interest in physical systems leads me to approach An Atomic Narrative aspects of the structure of this teetering system which is constantly precarious in its present prolific organic incarnation. Inside and out it’s a hive of micro business and industry – every iniquitous nook and cranny lucrative.
‘An Atomic Narrative’ has grown out of ‘facialities’, a series of segmentary mapping works that deal with parallels between aerial views of the microscopic and geological.
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