loops

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.

Cityloops

Extract 1

02’05”

Cityloops

Extract 2

01’42”

Cityloops

Extract 3

01’49”

Cityloops

Extract 4

02’17”

Cityloops

Extract 5

02’03”

In modern Athens, the vehicles of mass transportation are called metaphorai. To go to work or come home, one takes a “metaphor” - a bus or a train. Stories could also take this noble name: every day, they traverse and organise places, they select and link them together, they make sentences and itineraries out of them. They are spatial trajectories.

The Practice of Everyday Life

Michel de Certeau

There are 24 Cityloops in all. 24 Dubliners walk and talk about their everyday journey to work or school in Dublin. Each walk takes place in a specific place in the city, each place was chosen by its walker for its significance to his or her life.The places are disparate: parks, football fields, shopping malls sprinkled over the vast canvas that is Dublin, but the accompanying words link the places, or sweep across the city and the world, telescoping time and pulling places and people together into a single continuous narrative. Cityloops follows a loose structure ordained by connections or crossovers in the stories told, much as a chance meeting in the city might change the direction that a day or life will take. Each new speaker introduces another place, a person, a time, an event or an idea and opens up more possibilities of connections. In this way the system is endless, and in an infinite world one could theoretically continue until every journey by every person who has ever lived in Dublin becomes part of the nexus. But our world is finite, as is our time, so we stopped at 24. Following the paths of these 24 cityloops led us all over Dublin and back to our initial hunting ground. Combing a beach, the wet sand under overturned rocks reveals lost treasure, scurrying life; to walk over it in darkness is to walk on thousands of tiny sparkling lights. Similarly in Dublin a few overturned stones turned up a constellation of glowing lights.