MAKING RUINS

This selection of films considers our built environment, and our ruins, as a physical manifestation of political and social forces. Ruins stand as monuments to history’s fluidity. The lives of buildings reveal how quickly ideologies, cultural mores, demographics and political priorities can change leaving the structures they created hollow and crumbling. In Making Dust the ethics of this churn of building and destruction is considered as a Catholic mega church is torn down; The Hall looks at a communal halls abandonment as a sign of the move away from state driven collectivism; Bad For A Moment considers the agency that individuals have in enacting a process of social cleansing in Portugal and the role that creative industries play in this process.    

The session will feature a Q&A with Fiona Hallinan (Making Dust) and Chen Zhan (The Hall), chaired by filmmaker, researcher and curator Roisin Agnew.

Making Dust

Fiona Hallinan / 2024 / Ireland / 45:00

Making Dust is a portrait of the demolition of Ireland's second largest Catholic Church. Understanding this moment as a 'rupture', the film maps an essay by architectural historian Ellen Rowley on to documentation of the building's dismantling. Featuring oral interviews recorded at the site of the demolition and in a nearby hairdressers, the film invites viewers to pause and reflect on this ending alongside the community of the building.

The Hall

Jingru (Cyan) Cheng, Chen Zhan, Mengfan Wang / 2024 / China / 03:45

This super short film is about how space might speak for itself. The People’s Commune Assembly Hall was an iconic site for political gatherings and propaganda during China’s national collectivisation period between the 1950s and 1980s. Its physical space, the projected space and the reconstructed filmic space are juxtaposed, amplifying the inherent narrative capacity of the commune hall.

Bad For a Moment

Daniel Soares / 2024 / Portugal / 15:00

A team-building event goes wrong and brings the owner of an architecture studio face-to-face with the residents of the neighborhood that his company is gentrifying.