Catalogue > At random

Deirdre Donoghue

What Belongs To The Sky?

Doc. expérimental | hdv | couleur | 14:7 | Finlande | 2012

What Belongs To The Sky? investigates social aspects between language and communication in a situation where the ability to speak is broken down. Together with my video and audio recording equipment, I inserted myself in the everyday life of an elderly couple living on an isolated, bi-lingual island of Utö in the middle of the Baltic Sea. The man has Bingswangers disease, a type of dementia, and as a result suffers of aphasia. Previously a bi-lingual, charismatic and an eloquent public speaker, his speech has in the last few years been reduced to a very basic level, consisting of simple sentences, isolated words, and supporting bodily gestures. More often than not, he is unable to finish his sentences and give form to his thoughts through words. His inability to partake in the social through language and speaking is heightened by his poor sight and hearing. However, it is specifically his loss of language and its creative power to construct, order and mediate that has placed him in a social abyss with diminished means to navigate in the social and so to have proper agency as a human being.

Deirdre M. Donoghue (b. 1971, Finland) lives and works in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. She is a performance and visual artist, writer and researcher with a background in theatre, directing, photography and fine arts. She received a BA in Photography at the Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland, and a MA in Fine Arts at the Piet Zwart Institute, the Netherlands, and The Plymouth University, United Kingdom. She is a co-founder of ADA, Area for Debate and Art, (NL), where she has been co-curating and developing its public program since 2008 and curated the project The Open Office for Words (2008-2010). She has co-edited the publications Resonant Bodies, Voices, Memories, (Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam University, 2009) and Pick Up This Book (ADA Rotterdam, 2013), and has contributed to the publications P.A.I.R: Chorografie (PeerGrouP, 2010) and Our House in The Middle of The Street (ed. Bekan, Kromhout, Kunsthuis SYB, 2010.) She is currently running a long term research project entitled (m)other voices, the maternal as an attitude, maternal thinking and the production of time and knowledge in collaboration with Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art, (NL).