During the time I lived in Belfast, I began to sense the architectural fabric of the city, of the ordinary and overlooked buildings often at the verge of disappearing, in connection with my own unconscious psychic reality. I found myself wandering on the outskirts of the commercial city-centre, moving in between remains or marks of absence of its in- dustrial and Victorian history, searching a way to apprehend, delineate and deal with this fading space.
As I began to work, I soon grew fascinated with this unsettling feeling that returned in my images through animalistic and severed haunting forms, which somehow evinced an undertone of self-directed emotional violence and self-destruction, so characteristic of melancholic disorder.
Through photography, reflective and creative writing, and film, I aim to re-map spaces in cities intuitively and libidinally, while dealing with notions of time and duration. Falling Into Its Walls mixes narrative repetitions with images of a fragmented built environment, inviting the viewer to delve into its imagined and melancholic space, and to apprehend the weight of its history.
In a more latent form, this work also suggests questions around the personal and collec- tive desire to remember or forget the past, as determining positions towards the social and political understanding of the city.
Recently, I accidentally double-exposed a photograph of the motorway in Belfast, which bears the trace of a long-gone community, with a street corner in Dublin from a neigh- bourhood characterised by its ambiguous working-class history. Within our uncertain political times, and drawing on the past of these two places, this image carries within itself a question mark on the future, overlaying the movement of history onto our own desires and memories.
Frederic Huska 