Clear Away the Rubble / Glan an Spallaí ar Shiúl is an open research project about housing, one of the most critical issues conditioning the lives of artists and others in Dublin, and Ireland, today. Clear Away the Rubble / Glan an Spallaí ar Shiúl is an exercise in 'learning in public', the first iteration of a multi-year programme about housing, that will try to find routes in to the questions that surround it from a wide range of perspectives, including those of artists, scholars and activists.
The project kicks off with a screening programme organised in collaboration with AEMI. The selected works consider a range of ideas: housing activism, conditions in which people are living, home, utopian/dystopian ideas underpinning planning and development, and the financialistion and commodification of housing.
Screening Programme in collaboration with AEMI - 75mins
Ben Thorp Brown, Cura, 2020,17 minutes 34 seconds
Dianne Murphy, See what you want, 2020, 2 minutes 41 seconds (captioned)
Dianne Murphy, The Other, 2020, 3 minutes 1 second (captioned)
Eva Richardson McCrea, Rope, 2022, 14 minutes 15 seconds (captioned)
Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Prologue: Squat/Anti-Squat, 2016, English subtitles, 37 minutes 5 seconds
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Ben Thorp Brown, Cura
The main protagonist of the film is a tortoise; an ancient animal that embodies Cura, the Roman goddess of care, voiced by American vocalist Joan La Barbara. The setting is Richard and Dion Neutra's VDL Research House II in Los Angeles. Architect Neutra carefully designed his projects to elicit human sensory and emotional responses. (Notes courtesy IFFR)
Dianne Murphy, See What You Want
Focusing on the architecture of class in Dublin city, See What You Want envisions the ‘The Lady on the Rock’ as a witness to gentrification and to the experiences of people and events shaping the urban landscape over the last thirty years.
Dianne Murphy, The Other
The Other focuses on gentrification and the development sites which are erected in place of working class areas, questioning who they are really being built for and for what purpose. Communities and areas being demolished and “improved” by an undefinable “Other”, for the “Other”.
Eva George Richardson McCrea, Rope
In Rope, three men dressed in smart casual attire sit around a table in a dilapidated old building. 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. The three men eat food from takeaway cartons and drink champagne as they talk.
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, CEO of Sidewalk Labs (Google's "smart cities" start-up); Richard Florida; 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 is from a pop-up Jamaican restaurant in the same courtyard as the building where the film was shot. It is unclear what the property developer plans to do with these buildings in the future.
Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Prologue: Squat/Anti-Squat
Made in two parts that mirror each other in form and content, Prologue: Squat/Anti-Squat is a filmic engagement with the structure of difference in repetition evident in its architectural location, Aldo van Eyck’s Tripolis building in Amsterdam. The film sheds light on a squatting action in the Biljmer district in 1970s Amsterdam by a group of Dutch Caribbean activists, juxtaposing it with two recent squatting episodes.
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With thanks to the Arts Council or Ireland, DCC, Arts Council Film, LUX and with thanks to Maeve Connolly.
With very special thanks to AEMI.
