Last Man (2011) by Martin Healy follows a solitary male figure as he conducts caretaking activities in an empty building. Filmed in the old terminal of Cork Airport, the vacated site suggests a foretaste of a possible future, or perhaps the recording of a neglected past.

These possible scenarios conjure up both the concept of a world without oil – making air travel impossible – or even a future where aviation has become obsolete and what remains is nostalgia for the archaic technologies of the past.

The film’s title refers to The Last Man (1826), a dystopian novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley set in the late 21st century which imagines a future pandemic that ravages the human population. Healy’s work thus takes on eery new relevance in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and its resulting loss of life, public fear, and aviation restrictions.

Martin Healy (b.1967) is an Irish visual artist who works predominantly in video and photography. A graduate of Crawford College of Art & Design, he has exhibited widely over the past two decades and held residencies at Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris; Irish Museum of Art, Dublin; and PS1 Contemporary Art Centre, New York.