This weekend I will visit Berlin for the first time and I can't wait! But I am also incredibly nervous as it marks the beginning of a project that I have been thinking about for a few months now, but am only just getting off the ground.
The project is called 'Practicing Ireland' and will be made up of filmed interviews with cultural producers either from Ireland and practicing abroad, non-Irish and practicing in Ireland or Irish practicing in Ireland. All must be actively engaging with Ireland or Irishness, though not necessarily in name, but through critical engagement with contemporary issues.
The first interview will be with the artist Mark Curran who works and lives between Dublin and Berlin. I hope to ask him what it is like practicing between the centre and the periphery, and how he understands his place as an artist in contemporary society.
The point of departure for this project is the desire to create a snapshot of the current moment through the voices of the people to whom we look to tell us about ourselves in this moment of crisis, the people responsible for re-mythologising post-crisis Ireland. I want to ask them what it is like to bear the expectations of a society that at the same time as it is cutting support for the arts. I want to know how they experience Ireland and Irishness in this post-national, transcultural, globalised world. I want to create a conversation that shows Ireland, not as a unique place of artistic genius, but a site of complex, global cultural entanglements, potential and hope.
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