Closing event and publication launch Wednesday 8 May at 7pm

This work considers Wolfe Tone and the revolutionary moment of 1798, reading it through the current economic climate of Europe, Ireland and Inishowen and the revolutionary possibilities of today.

Three strands of research – into re-enactment techniques, Wolfe Tone’s diaries and revolutionary writings, and contemporary strategies of protest and dissent – formed the basis of the work. A collaboration with Moville Clothing Company to produce the uniforms for a ‘re-enactment’ performance provided an opportunity to link these concerns with broader questions of austerity and economic crisis in the region. One of the few remaining garment factories in the area, Moville Clothing Company mainly produces uniforms for the beauty industry, clergy and the legal profession.

The culminating performance staged at Fort Dunree referenced tactics of re-enactment, embracing and exaggerating the substitutions, distortions, displacements and inaccuracies inherent in the process. A collage version of Wolfe Tone’s authorial voice was then further estranged through the use of ‘the people’s microphone’. This method of ‘amplification’ was employed in Occupy Wall Street, where electrical amplification equipment was prohibited. In this practice, audience members gather around a speaker and repeat his or her speech, which is delivered in short phrases. At the limit of earshot each phrase is repeated again and radiates out through the crowd in waves of repetition.

The fragmented, intentionally inaccurate version of history performed in And your feet unable to find the ground explores questions around repetition, reproduction and the imposition of the present and imagined future upon the past that is intrinsic to the process of re-enactment.