Tim Feeney "Dowsing"

Tim Feeney shares ten repetitive sonic interventions filmed within the eroded landscapes of the Burren, County Clare, Ireland

Ten repetitive sonic interventions within the eroded landscapes of the Burren, County Clare, Ireland.

These occur at sites of local “anti-monuments:” a kilometers-long, natural limestone pavement high above Galway Bay; stone farm walls and remnants of circular structures on hillsides; cairns near a shoreline; a field of glacial boulders interrupted by a road smashed from the surrounding stone formations, in forced public work by the starving during the Great Hunger of 1845 to 1852. These structures speak to both the passage of geologic time, and the care and efforts of human survival beginning in the Neolithic period and tended through the present, though local history at each site may be lost, or unrecorded.

These are introduced in title cards in English, italicized as a term in a language foreign to the observer, and in Irish in plain font, as in an observer’s native language.

From one perspective, a sonic divining or physical research into the properties of land, space, light, and time in these locations; from another, an attempt as an “Irish-American” to reckon with language, archaeology, and history felt as formative but inarticulable without lived context.

After a point, you can only ask the stone so many questions, and sometimes you can only hear your own voice in response.