PASSAGE MIGRANTS
‘Passage Migrants is a Super 8 film work documenting Poolbeg Peninsula, Dublin Bay. Utilising the camera as a walking diary, the work explores movement and aspects of the physical and transitory landscape. A narrative narrated by voice artist Regan O’Brien combined with breath and field recordings create the soundscape.’ The voiceover text for Passage Migrants was written in response to a series of filming walks on Poolbeg peninsula from January to May 2013. I used the Dublin City Council Heritage Offices file on the Poolbeg power station and area as research material. I was also reading ‘Wanderlust’ by Rebecca Solnit. I was interested in the idea of the female wanderer because of the female Travellers who use to live on the site and also my own position as a woman walking the peninsula. The extracts below seem relevant to this investigation. – Aoife Desmond
‘The body described again and again in postmodern theory does not suffer under the elements, encounter other species, experience primal fear or much in the way of exhilaration, or strain its muscles to the utmost. In sum, it doesn’t engage in physical endeavor or spend time out of doors…….
….Travel, the other great theme of recent postmodern theory, is about being utterly mobile; the one has failed to modify the other, and we seem to be reading about the postmodern body shuttled around by airplanes and hurtling cars, or even moving around by no apparent means, muscular, mechanical, economic, or ecological. The body is nothing more than a parcel in transit, a chess piece dropped on another square; it does not move but it is moved. In a sense, these are problems arising from the level of abstraction of contemporary theory. Much of the terminology of location and mobility – words like nomad, decentered, marginalized, deterritorialized, border, migrant, and exile – are not attached to specific places and people; they represent instead ideas of rootlessness and flux that seem as much the result of the ungrounded theory as its putative subject. Even in these endeavors to come to terms with the tangible world of bodies and motion, abstraction dematerializes them again. The words themselves seem to move freely and creatively, unburdened by the responsibilities of specific description.’ (Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit pg 28-29)