To the Wire
to the wire (Belfast Exposed until 6 June 2024) is the second of a three-part, three-year series of NIMHAF co-creations, travelling this year to meet artistic practitioners and organisations in Beirut, Lebanon. It is a multi-disciplinary production featuring the work of Vault members Chad Alexander and Jonathan Brennan, alongside that of artistic practitioners Dawn Richardson, Emily DeDakis, Barry Cullen and Paul Doran
A conflict journalist retraces old steps through the cities of Belfast and Beirut, haunting hotels, invoking old rituals and beginning to piece together missing memories. As these landscapes open up, we watch the colours of two histories bleed together. Buried traumas peer through surfaces and the reporter rediscovers a strange machine that threatens to unearth them completely.
to the wire mixes footage from Northern Ireland Screen’s Digital Film Archive with original material captured in Northern Ireland and Lebanon in August / September 2023. It is the second part of the All Flesh is Grass trilogy.
to the wire continues an exploration into what the mind can tell us about stories and what stories can tell us about the mind, focusing particularly on how landscape and ritual can shape both.
Drawing inspiration from the histories of the Europa in Belfast and the Commodore in Beirut, two hotels which acted as homes to the international press, to the wire reflects on the ways in which events are relayed to us and how the stories we are told become the histories we share and dispute. These hotels act as symbolic vessels through which we navigate the murky waters of history and collective memory.
The piece takes direction from improvisational techniques, late twentieth-century industrial music, and the artists’ fascination into how the occult can be explored through experimental instruments. It explores how confrontational we should be when revisiting trauma, and whether some methods might leave us with echoes we do not wish to hear, or open to forces greater than we are ready to reckon with.
Shortly after capturing the project’s original footage (during the NIMHAF residency in Lebanon in August and September 2023) the living reality of that country and the people we met rapidly changed, with numerous journalists being killed in Southern Lebanon and communities of civilians displaced, shifting the relevance of to the wire’s fictional history. Selections of audio recorded in conversations with artists and arts organisations in Beirut have been overlaid, tying the piece’s slippery grasp of time to a real moment and recognising the privilege of safety we inhabit.
With deep gratitude to Beirut Print Workshop, Haven for Artists, Dongola Publishing, British Council Northern Ireland, British Council Lebanon, Beirut Synth Centre, Zoukak Theatre, Dar al Mussawir, Chadi Abou Zeid, Azadeh Sobout, Abou Elie Pub and all the people that helped us along the way in Lebanon.
to the wire is a co-production of Hosta Projects and NIMHAF. Supported by the Baring Foundation, NI Digital Film Archive, Belfast Film Festival, Belfast Exposed and Film Hub NI allocating funds on behalf of BFI.
‘As artist practitioners we continue to stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine and Lebanon and appeal for an unconditional and permanent ceasefire. We unequivocally condemn all forms of islamophobia, antisemitism and racism’. (from the ‘to the wire’ team).