Project Arts Centre and AEMI are pleased to host an artist talk and screening with Eva George Richardson McCrea as part of our open research project, Clear Away the Rubble / Glan an Spallaí ar Shiúl; her film Rope was part of the project's screening programme, organised with AEMI. Eva will talk about the themes and research of Rope and her practice in general.
In Rope, three men dressed in smart casual attire sit around a table in the decaying corpse of a building. They eat food from takeaway cartons and drink champagne as they engage in small talk about holidays and hobbies, have a conversation about Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Rope, and discuss various aspects of property development - among other things.
Alongside improvisational dialogue devised in collaboration with the actors, and the conversation about Rope, which is developed from online reviews, the majority of the other dialogue is constructed from interviews and writings of Daniel Doctoroff, former CEO of Sidewalk Labs (Google's "smart cities" start-up); Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class; and Patrik Schumacher of Zaha Hadid Architects.
The location of the shoot is a vacant building owned by a prominent property developer in Frankfurt’s Ostend. The food in the film was provided by a pop-up Jamaican restaurant in the same courtyard as the building where the film was shot. What the property developer plans to do with these buildings in the future is unknown.
