‘Seven for a Story’
The Dubliner, Holländergatan 1, 11136 Stockholm
16.30-18.30, 30th May, 2016
In 1930s Ireland, the Schools Folklore Scheme was established to preserve local stories in a fledgling nation which was trying to forge its identity as a relatively-recent independent state. During this period, stories were collected by schoolchildren from 5,000 primary schools countrywide and today it remains one of the largest collections of ethnological material in the world. Many of these tales have become forgotten in local consciousness but the archives tell tales of rebellion, local history, folklore, fairy rings, curses, folk medicine and locals imbued with cures for illnesses.
Taking relevant 80 year old archival material as it starting point, this project is centred on the small country village of Allenwood. Instead of stories with beginnings, middles and ends, its tales are layered, fragmented, incomplete and infinite, existing and surrounding everyday life, silently embedded in its geography. In the archives, names of people today only known as elders, can be reencountered through their writings as schoolchildren. This long term project will use this archival material to trace the evolution of the townland’s landscape, scraping away and excavating layers of history, migration, industry, personal and collective memories, local folk knowledge and superstition, which through rapid modernization, indifference and sometimes embarrassment has been lost.
This exhibition aims to foster discussion regarding the appreciation and preservation of local history and local idiosyncrasies. Through evolution and use, new traditions and belief systems are created, entangled with the old, but adapted to cater for the contemporary audience. But how do newer customs sit alongside embedded traditions? Do cultural practices lose their purposes and through evolution does meaning shift to meaningless? With culture constantly evolving, the project will bring a temporary culture to the spatial boundaries of the exhibition space, only existing for its duration.