Moira Tierney
Are We There Yet?
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Add rightsFormat DVD Interzone (limited edition)
Original format 16mm
Year 2010
Artist(s) Moira Tierney
Running time 10 min
Films
This DVD contains 3 consecutive loops:
# 1 music by macdara smith
# 2 silent
# 3 music by the bahh band
Description
"When I arrived in Manor to launch the workshops, I was delighted to discover how little importance the participating children attached to the border. As one of their teachers said: we don't use those words anymore; I have a 20-year-old son who doesn't know what the Troubles were; there's no border anymore... and indeed, traveling between Leitrim and Fermanagh, it was impossible to know when we had crossed the mysterious line; even my mobile phone couldn't decide when to welcome me to the United Kingdom.
It was during one of these journeys that I shot the film's images - one January afternoon, with one of the famous local mists weighing heavily on the hills and the road disappearing into itself at every turn. When the rushes came back from the lab, they seemed interesting enough to blow up to 16mm, with a view to making a loop for the project's final exhibition. The optical printer kept breaking down, stuttering, jumping, jamming; I rewound, started again, reloaded...
I kept everything in the end - the jumps and the ends of reels as well as the more conventionally well-behaved images; for me, it represents the apparent paradox of the border and the difficulty one faces when having to describe something so dubious - landscape? political imposition? colonial hangover? not to be mentioned in polite society? fact or fiction? comedy, tragedy or farce? To which the only answer I found was:
are we there yet?*" — Moira Tierney
*are we there yet?
Media
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