C A S C A D I N G , H I G H
Layered 35mm photographic prints on vegetal paper
Cascading, high is a photographic installation documenting the financial districts and developing docklands in cities such as Lisbon, London, Dublin and Cork. It examines the financialization and homogenization of space. Capturing the phantasmagorical effects of these glass and steel structures it echoes the illusionary and disorientating sense of living within the structures of neoliberalism.
C E A S E L E S S , M O R E
Spoken word performance and installation
Ceaseless, more spoken word performance explores a breathlessness of humanity by the hand of capitalism, and the drive towards perpetual progress. A sense of accelerating constriction undergirds the performance. It weaves social and political contexts and its effects on the corporeal and takes a critical stance on our current reality. Using materials from the adjacent construction site viewed from the window, the inner and outer environments are linked.
O N U N S O L I D G R O U N D
Suspended reeds, video projection, sound
On Unsolid Ground draws from architectural research on the particular street which the exhibition was being held South Main Street which referenced the streets previous state as an area of reed beds. This work imagines Cork City in its previous form as a marshland, pre reclamation and development, meandered by the river Lee. A phantom place in a crypt like room, its acts almost like a homage to the lost landscape. Through coalescing fragments of time and space our positioning in an interlinked, transforming ecology is brought into question.
Oscillation: An altering rhythm
19 - 21 May, 2023
inter_site at the Counting House
Article Extract by Pádraig Spillane
Images of financial skyscrapers appear in collaged sequences of angles in Kate’s work Cascading, high. These high key image arrangements are suspended on paper light material, standing opaquely, taking their position with newly constructed city vistas seen through the renovated windows of the building. This mix of light and confrontation - of what urban space has become – blends with the new red brick and plastic clad façades of expensive student accommodation buildings just outside. This housing mingles with the tilts and inclines of the work’s ashen appearance of financial centres from different European cities. As an installation, it tends to the recognisable homogenisation and extractive forces on landsites, where money is both accrued and digitally transferred through. This site responsiveness highlights the ways capital has intruded and infiltrated shared common spaces. How the tethering of techno capital-operations to locations has created spaces for its own machinations, its own physical points for increasements where prosperousness is to be pulled out of sight behind encoded city frontages. However, within the semi darkness there is a remove to interiority though this work’s positioning. These commercial clean lines are brought in to relief and yet kept at a distance; a strategy of observing and of thinking through a next move against the continuing financialization of the world.
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In their collective approaches to site[7] and their ways of working individually on related matters, inter_site work with conceptual leanings in how to understand this contemporary time. Their works are permeated with a resistance and energy to think through and share with those who come to experience their installations. The considered use of cultural and consumer remainders with moments of spectacle heightens the viewer’s experience through site responsive strategies. Such events are looking for the dissonant through a performativity of spaces, exploring what it means to live in both an ending and a beginning that cannot be evaded and must be faced.
In this way, the shadowy atmosphere of the Counting House installation takes notice of new orientations and vectors within the world, ones of a letting go or even an overcoming of this world. As Andrew Culp states in his Dark Deleuze[8],perhaps by destroying this world of connected capital power that ravages imaginaries and the planetary, there might come a new world with better ways and descriptions to deal with current issues. inter_site’s work allows such imaginative interference for a renewal of looking to futures. Through conjuring remainders, poetic works, and contrivances with vision technologies, they allow a further way of recognising the structures that hold influence, with potential for untangling their hold. These workings chime with Berardi’s idea of excess as “the condition of revelation, of emancipation from established meaning and of the disclosure of an unseen horizon of signification: the possible.”[9] The given of this contemporary world made of signs, symbols, products, and the networks of financial structures was once created. It is not to be seen at the only or mandatory. Its construction shows that things can be done differently. In this sense, inter_site at the Counting House was a claiming of territory through excess with spectacle and material play. In this suspended space, this installation’s compulsion was an exploration of objects and signals of the contemporary, where new cracks were allowed to come through.
Pádraig Spillane is an artist, educator and freelance curator based in Cork city, Ireland.
[7] inter_site’s Deirdre Breen’s design of this publication-as-site comes under this also.
[8] Andrew Culp, Dark Deleuze, (USA: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 66
[9] Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Breathing: Chaos and Poetry, (USA: Semiotext(e), 2018), 20