Aiden Joseph Brady

Homehouse: Exploring Everyday Connection To Place

Homehouse focuses on the area around my mother’s childhood home in South Armagh. The work’s content includes informal interviews, ambient field recordings and varied video material. Throughout, my subjective experience of engaging with the place is foregrounded. Connection to place, rather than place itself, is the focus of the project. In taking this focus, the work deals with a primarily experiential phenomenon. As such, the work face’s an impossible task in artistically representing its subject. The work exploits this critical tension throughout. Instead of attempting to represent everyday connection to place, the installation is the affect of my overall experience engaging with the process. As a result of becoming concerned with embodied experience, all the material emphasises physical presence. This is evident in the intrusive bodily aesthetics within the work. The excessive shake of a camera while walking or cycling exemplifies this. In considering physical engagement with place, the work draws from Psychogeography. As a result, the political and social contexts of the experiences included are considered. In considering the relationship between my own experience and those of the interviewees, my own authorship comes into question. To problematise my role as author, a probability based system is used to control the playback of all materials. As a result, I myself am not aware of all possible combinations of materials and their impacts on the audience. The interviews included give a sense of the non-specific nature of everyday connection to place. The contrasting and occasionally disagreeing perspectives included attest to that. This non-specificity is attributed to the fact that ‘the everyday’ is the process of routinization by which things become normalised within our lives. Each individual included has a distinct everyday relationship to their surroundings. The artwork is the result of pursuing these critical questions and engaging in this personal process. The installation runs across three video installations and a stereo audio setup. These provide insight into separate aspects of the work. The experience of knowledge acquisition, the violent notion of representing embodied experience and the realisation of my own detachment during the project, are all apparent.