Ballymun Sequence (Extract)

Anne Cleary & Denis Connolly

Digital Film. 2007. 11’ 07”.

Music: Andrew Hamilton

This 11 minute musical piece is the result of a unique participative art project, Still Here, that took place in Ballymun, a suburb of Dublin, from June 2006 to June 2007.  The Ballymun Housing Project, built in the 1960’s, experienced social problems common to many urban housing projects worldwide: poverty, crime and alienation.  The area is now undergoing renewal.

Ballymun Sequence is conceived as a “temporal mural”. We wanted to make a work that would go beyond the specifics of the place and look at more universal questions - movement essentially - as a metaphor for life and growth.

The images are abstracted using custom designed software to transform the fragments of life into fragments of moving painting.

This gives the work a powerful visual aesthetic, inspired by the tradition of social mural painting in the early 20th century.  Diego Riviera and Roal Dufys’ murals showed people in the context of cultural or political symbols.  We equally chose to place images of people side by side with images of our time, in this case the pervasive images of a modern city.

Andrew Hamiltons’ music, with its echoes of Stravinsky and Gershwin, reinforces this cultural reference, and the brightly coloured patterns call to mind modern French painters such as Matisse, or later Support-Surface artist who worked with repeated motifs.