BEYOND LEAVING iii

 Beyond Leaving will be at exhibition in the National Photographic Archive, Temple Bar, Dublin,
from November to early March 2017. It is the biggest Irish platform to date for my work. The installation will feature some 25 new large scale photographic works, video, and artifact generated over the  period of net emigration from 2009 to 2016. Thanks to all who pledged support to the  Fund: it , campaign, although it is now finished you can see the details here click here to have a look



On the 24th of August 2016 the Central Statistics Office of Ireland ( CSO )made a very important announcement. It was this. To the year ending in April 2016 there was a return to net inward migration for Ireland for the first time since 2009.

The tone of this announcement is reflected in the global Irish Newsletter from the office of the Junior Minister with responsibility for the Diaspora in which the headline events are the Fleadh Cheoil, The Rose of Tralee, and the All Ireland Hurling and Camogie finals. Granted there is articles about the Irish Australian Support and Resource Bureau, Melbourne, Australia, and the upcoming United Nations Migration Conference, but the emphasis here is on the other and not the self.  And although the issues around Irish migration have proven to be thorny over the years, the discussion about world migration is far bigger than any conversation we could have about the current Irish experience. So this months newsletter amounts to one thing, deflection.
Although there is still the small mater  of the 76,200 people who left here in that year there was in fact the small number of 3,100 more people entering the country than those who have left.
This signals the end of a cycle.
We can now quantify the movements of this period. In fact the CSO has done this for us and I suppose having things  tied up neatly with a bow is what the we as consumers of the media and presented fact demand! I will only present one figure from the chart below and the rest can be extracted by your own gaze. The light blue of the period of net emigration adds up to half a million people.

Looking beneath the surface of the Irish experiences at this point is  an essential part of building an understanding of  of this period of net emigration. Following on from my personal project On Leaving, I have been working on a further research project with some of the recently departed and some of those who have chosen to return home. The work has been conducted as part of  IADT Dun Laoghaire practice led research project and I am grateful for the guidance and counsel of both Dr. Mark Curran and  Dr. Justin Carville as I move towards exhibition of these work.
The video clip above is a short extract of some conversations had with some of my collaborators.
 Thank you for reading this post and I would be delighted to receive your comments and of course your support  for the fundit campaign at http://fundit.ie/project/beyond-leaving

BEYOND LEAVING ii

Its been such a pleasure being back in an exhibition space, showing work, talking with those who came to see it, or who just ventured in after they had lunch in the building, or indeed, after they had visited EPIC. I am delighted and excited about the response to the work and feel assured that audiences will be very interested in the next step along this road to understanding what in fact it is to be a modern Irish person. Either here or there!
To this end I am now introducing Beyond Leaving  and the concept behind my next show. A couple of years ago now I set off on a new smaller, but a little more rigorous research, to try and fathom the distance between  expectation  and the reality of today for a small group of people who collaborated with me in the production of the Leaving Dublin series.
This research will culminate in a show in the National Photographic Archive this coming November.
The show will feature new photographic works, video, interview, audio-visual, and research documentation.
One strand of these works will be a series of skype interviews which have been made with collaborators. The clip here is demonstrative of the many ways that this kind of communications can be laborious and unfruitful and it can sometimes be hard to realise ones intent.However as              e-communication platforms expand there are now several alternative ways to talk with video  to people all over the world, facetime, whats app, facebook messenger video,  and google hangouts all look like making this area of communications easier and more fruitful into the future.

So here is my opener, my first piece so to speak.
I hope you enjoy it and what it has to say.
there is lots more to come in this stream.
Please like ans share and as alway your comments will be appreciated and replied to as they will help  to shape the process of making the exhibition.

With thanks
David

TIME FOR ACTION

Aoife Mc Monagle,Toronto,Canada.

Greetings one and all.
Today I am sitting back and taking it easy after a marathon few weeks in which I covered a lot of ground.
You have seen some pictures from Sao Paulo already.
Since then I have travelled from Aoife in Toronto,on to Julie in Vancouver, from there to San Francisco to Sarah and on by car to Berkeley to se Jana and family.
From there on to Hollywood by car to see Brian and Aileen, then to Mexico to see Ara and Darragh, on to New York to Visit with Naoise,and then here to see Sean, Leia,Astrid and Sebastian.
This only leaves one visit to Akron,Ohio to visit Aoife Mooney the third of the three Aoifes in this now over four year long process.
Well now, when I say sitting back I suppose I mean not running off to the airport or car rental garage to move on after 12 or 24 hours in one place.
In fact I have been holed up in my old friends Eileen and Mark's house in Oak Park a short drive from downtown Chicago, planning the next phase of this insane adventure.
Whilst here I have taken the opportunity to process my films and I ran around today with Eileen to try and get some low res scans for this post.
We found a place but didn't have a week to wait for the results so what you see are the results of an improvisation with an iPad (lightbox), my Hasselblad and an extension tube.

Brian O'Neill,Hollywood,California,U.S.A.

Why such haste I hear you ask,why run around the place like a mad thing!whats the point in revisiting all these people!
Well its interesting you should ask!
 Back in December last is when this roller coaster ride started. I had a call from Solas Nua
asking if I would work with them to bring my show to Washington D.C. They had hosted the documentary Skin In The Game, a film in which my work featured and it had hit more than one of the key people in that organisation as interesting and very relevant to issues currently on the agenda in Washington.
Straight away I started planning and it very quickly became apparent that a book to Finnish the project and to present at the next set of exhibitions was the way forward.
  So here I am, again swinging from tree to tree trying to make it all work, knowing that a crash to ground is just one more vine away if I don't keep my wits about me.
Right now I have an active project on ,(click to see), Fundit.ie and Its Aim is to raise 50% of the cost of production of a self published book.
This Is where you,the readers of this blog come in.You know how long I have worked on this project,you know the quality of the work, you know the depth of information contained with in this blog regarding this insightful and historically significant work.
You Know that a three hundred page fully formed volume of this work would be a major achievement
and thus I am appealing to you to go to the fundit page(click here) and just Pre-order your copy.
By Paying for it up front you are ensuring that this project comes full circle in a timely fashion,the book gets produced and you get your copy at, or below the final cover price.

Ara Lopez,Darragh McMunn,Teotihuancan pyramid,Mexico

When I return home on the 23rd of may I will scan and present more  work from around the corners of this amazing continent.

Please share and let others for whom this work might be interesting know by sharing all relevant links

Thanks 

DAVID