The Black Monolith of the Flâneur: MAC Belfast

Commissioned by and exhibited at the MAC in Belfast, in the form of a projected slideshow and a series of framed images, the work has also grown into a publication composed of 40 images and a reflective text retracing the performance of photographing throughout the city.

This work portrays a melancholic and indecisive figure, the fâneur, a ‘stroller’ or ‘loafer’, an observer of modern urban life, whose movements are reduced to the
perimeter of Dublin’s north inner city. The fâneur roams through the urban on a helpless impulse, lost in the solitude of the real and the contradictions of an inner emotional experience. Lingering on
absurd and dissonant details, on pieces of construction
that are fragmented, divided, dilapidated, archaic or untimely – and with an impenetrable or unfathomable psychic dimension – the fâneur faces the impossibility
of grasping a historical memory, of progressing or taking a position in time.
Recalling the duration of the war of Irish independence a hundred years before, the project started just before the pandemic and continued through the series
of lockdowns and after that. Reminiscent of the vision
from post-war philosophers such as Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, the project reflects upon the creative process as a force that strives to remain open to uncertainty – forming a counter-narrative to the current hegemony of neoliberal fnancialisation.