Money, Space and Cinema, second screening.

The audience for this event included some of those who had attended the previous week, and many others who had not. The audience included 6 men and 11 women, in addition to the organisers and Irish film-maker Moira Sweemey who was a guest speaker for the dialogue. Largely made up of artists and designers, with two academics and one educator.

The dialogue was divided into three sections; the screening, and a conversation circle which began with a conversation between myself and Moira Stewart, a film director, producer and educator with a background in experimental cinema, including a period working alongside Patrick Keiller in the London Film-makers Co-op, and a less formal discussion in Tom Collins Public House.

The screening featured Robinson in Ruins, (Keiller, 2010), an experimental and poetic examination of the relationship between place, land, infrastructure and geopolitical aspects of capitalism, including cash crops, military politics, fuel and investment matters, ecology and the financial system.

For the dialogue we relocated to the rehearsal room which The Gaff had cleared out. This is a much smaller, warmer space, more conducive to conversation rather than the more formal set-up employed the previous week. 7 people left before the discussion, as there was a significant exhibition opening in the city centre.

Moira’s knowledge of the film and her experience with some of the events discussed in it (notably the Greenham Common Women’s Camp) made for a rich addition to the film itself, which was largely very well received by those in the discussion group, with some reservations and criticisms.

There was considerable debate on whether the density of the information contained in the voice-over was more or less easily assimilated on the basis of the partially related imagery. There were interesting ideas raised in relation to cognitive mapping (following Jameson), cultural geography (following Doreen Massey) and extractive capitalism and the Anthropocene. Some beautiful observations were about the multiple temporalities of the Anthropocene and the way that those emerge also through the journey of the film’s absent protagonist.

With a much smaller group these discussions continued in the pub afterwards, interwoven with other matters related to cognitive mapping and public space in Limerick.