luas_carol

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.

The Dublin and Blessington Steam Tramway that cut off the head of Malachi Horan’s ambulant ghost was closed down in 1932. Seventy two years later the new Dublin Light Rail System carried its first passengers from Amiens Street Station out along the Grand Canal, past a daisy chain of lilting place names, Fatima, Rialto, Goldenbridge, and Bluebell, past a black horse and a red cow, and through the Kings wood to the foot of Malachi’s mountains, now the new town of Tallaght. Small terraced houses line the canal, many dating from the 1920’s and ‘30s, when the Inchicore train works was a major source of employment for Dublin City. Luas Carol is a cinematic voyage on this new tramway, itself a moving eye through the city. The film represents not one journey but a composite image of many journeys in many different times or seasons. We imagined that the train itself was a Dolly, and existed solely to provide us with moving shots of Dublin. The shots, realistic and concrete as the train slows down and stops, transform as the train gathers speed. Words, sounds, and images from another Dublin, another time, another place, an impression, an image or an idea all merge to recreate the dreamy, almost drugged state that one slips into while looking out of the window of a moving train. Luas Carol is an ideal journey, where movement, sights, and sounds reflect the living, moving city.