For her keynote presentation Grace Weir will screen and discuss the making of her recent film ‘Darkroom’.
’Darkroom’ was filmed in two places. The first in one’s of the world’s oldest darkrooms in Birr Castle, when it had been emptied of its contents. The second in the reconstruction of the darkroom in the Exhibition Centre in the Castle’s grounds where the entire contents have been moved and reconstructed by conservators.
Interested in the relationship between reconstruction and photography, where both attempt to fix a moment, the two different filmed sequences are shown side by side forming an ambiguous entity whose lucidity in terms of activity and location comes in and out of clarity.
An oscillation between the harmony and dissonance of memory and its mediation through photography, ‘Dark Room’ reflects on the complexity of memory formation and its entanglement with internal and external worlds, imaginations and materialities, the archive and origination.