find_the_place

You'll come and find the place

A couple of years ago a friend gave us a compilation he had made of interpretations by famous international singers of the Irish ballad Danny Boy. Our friend had no idea of the painfully funny and sad memories the song brought back to me. When I was a child, my father, whom I have recently lost, used to make a habit of launching into a comically tuneless rendition of the song at the end of Sunday lunch. He would only manage a couple of bars before my sister, my brother and I would throw ourselves on him, begging him to shut up. About a year after receiving the compilation, we finally had the courage to listen through the whole thing in the company of our musician friends Jean Philippe Renoult and Dinah Bird. Jean Philippe took the CD away with him and, a few days later, returned with a chorus of Danny Boys from the world over, a delicious concoction of heart-wrenching kitsch, no better accompaniment for our ballad to the modern Ireland. Shopping centres in Dublin, in contrast with the suburban streets, are teeming with life: teenagers hanging out, children running up escalators, family excursions to the cinema, café meetings, old people strolling... All aspects of everyday life seem to have been sucked into these commercial cathedrals, malls with mechanical hearts that keep ticking and ticking 24 hours a day.One could fall back on the age old excuse, the weather, to explain why everything has to happen inside, but, come on, as our daughter Lotti would say, the total average annual precipitation in Dublin is 732 mm, lower than Sydney, New York City and even Dallas.You might argue back that people also spend most of their time indoors in these cities, but even Paris has a yearly rainfall of 650 mm, not far off Dublin’s average. Parisians live in the street, and whip out a chic mackintosh with matching galoshes at the least hint of a cloud. So it’s not the rain. Maybe it is a wide spread political endorsement of neo-liberal economics and the American way of life that has wrenched the title of citizen from the people of Dublin, and replaced it with that of consumer.

PREMISES

Project Statement

PRACTICES

PLACES

You'll come and find the place

Brookfield to Dublin Castle

PRODUCTION

Moving Dublin explores the everyday world of movement in Dublin and its vast sprawling suburbs spreading out west from the coastal city. We look at how far the contemporary world of the Dublin commuter has strayed from the civic realm it constituted when Joyce wrote the Wandering Rocks chapter of Ulysses.

Moving Dublin is to be published in the form of a book and DVD in March 2009 by Gandon Editions

Moving Dublin has been commissioned by South Dublin County Council through In Context 3 and funded under the Department of Environment, Heritage and Local Government’s Per Cent for Art Scheme.

Watch this video on

03’ 38” 1080i HDV

2008

Music

Jean Philippe Renoult

Suburban shopping centres had always been in the open, with stores connected by outdoor passageways. Gruen had the idea of putting the whole complex under one roof, with air-conditioning for the summer and heat for the winter. Almost every other major shopping centre had been built on a single level, which made for punishingly long walks. Gruen put stores on two levels, connected by escalators and fed by two-tiered parking. In the middle he put a kind of town square, a “garden court” under a skylight, with a fishpond, enormous sculpted trees, a twenty-one-foot cage filled with bright-coloured birds, balconies with hanging plants, and a café.

The Terrazzo Jungle, Malcolm Gladwel, New Yorker, March 15 2004

The Square shopping centre in Tallaght is only one of a series of concentrated new shopping and residential districts on the edges of Dublin and linked by the M50 motorway. The arguments that accompany the growing pattern of decentralisation in Dublin have echoed across the world for over a century: easy access to shops and services, less pressure on the city centre, less traffic congestion... Dublin’s pattern of growth echoes step for step the processes that took root in Los Angeles one hundred years ago and developed in a climate of economic liberalism throughout the 20th century. This new Dublin is nothing new. Soon to be replaced by an even bigger and brighter shopping centre, the Square fulfils Gruen's dream to the letter. Clutching shiny bags and parcels, brightly coloured Dublin songbirds make this gilded cage their natural habitat.