How do we learn about what is screened and hidden from view? And, when what lies behind these screens can be so hard to come to terms with, how can we better understand the stories that help us see it?
Over the past five decades, Ireland has published a number of state reports detailing endemic problems with its institutions of coercive confinement. Parallel to this official discourse, writers, dramatists, documentary makers, filmmakers and visual artists have produced an important body of work that exposes these institutional abuses as well as the ways in which they often remain unseen. These creators make visible coercive confinement – in other words, they screen it – in order show us how it has remained invisible, or screened, in Irish society.
Screening Coercive Confinement: Ireland’s institutions in word and image is a digital exhibition created by Dr James Little in collaboration with the Museum of Literature Ireland. The exhibition features the work of six creators who have made coercive confinement visible – from industrial and day schools, to psychiatric hospitals, to centres of direct provision. In this podcast series, we feature in-depth interviews with each artist.
St Brendan’s Hospital, Grangegorman was Ireland’s largest psychiatric institution. Playwright Colin Murphy was commissioned to write a play using the institution’s archive; The Asylum Workshop (2023) was then staged on the grounds of the former hospital. In this episode, Colin discusses the challenges of creating theatre out of an institutional archive, how this play relates to his other documentary theatre work as well as his experience of working on such sensitive material with collaborators at TU Dublin Conservatoire.
This project was funded by the EU and mentored by Prof. Emilie Pine at UCD’s School of English, Drama and Film. MoLI’s digital programme is supported by Ebow Digital. This podcast was produced by Ian Dunphy and Benedict Schlepper-Connolly.
