Emily McFarland / Curraghinalt

Curraghinalt, 2019 / 2020
Single channel video, 25 min 42 sec

Curraghinalt is the first work in a three-part video series (“Dtan-a-goo-saran-dthu (The Wind’s Changed”) that explores the changing ecology of a particular landscape in the Sperrin Mountains of West Tyrone, in the North of Ireland. This single-channel video, which utilises documentary forms, dislocated sound, and voices and images that are woven together, explores collective memory and moments of testimony from individual members of a small rural community based at the Greencastle Peoples Office – a collection of caravans high in the mountains that overlook a valley of farmland. The camp coalesced in early 2018 in response to plans that Dalradian Gold Limited submitted to The Department for Infrastructure in the North of Ireland. The sequence follows a conversation with community members including farmers, lorry drivers, engineers and retired people, at the Greencastle Peoples Office in 2019 on day 387 of their occupation of land acquired by the mining company. This dialogue, which shifts between shared experiences and personal accounts, converges with wider questions of solidarity, political representation, sovereignty, the circulation of capital, ideologies of capitalism and particular legacies of historical colonialism.