Michelle Deignan

Our Land
Single channel digital video, 13 mins 4 secs, 2008.

'Our Land' was filmed in St Anne's Park, a former estate owned by the Guinness family, in north Dublin City. Two actors narrate a complex web of information, culminating in an intimate conversation about the park while they overlook it from a window on the top floor of a new artists' studios complex. The narrative combines historical information about the location with rumours about the artist, ruminations on romanticism and art with stories about murder, mysticism, war and football. The actors refer to their 'British Asian' ethnicity, the use of accents in cinema and the film's audition process, drawing specific attention to their own roles in the film.

click on images for low res QuickTime movie of 'Our Land'. file size: 29 mb.

"At the closing of the video, both actors convene at one of the stable windows, and leave the script, and the tone of objectivity, behind. The third person is abandoned, as they argue about the semantics of words used to describe the scene of the park before them. "Nature is great and I'm astonished by it. I might even be afraid of it," the male presenter states. "You're not afraid of it," the woman counters. "I think you'd like to be. Makes it more exciting." Throughout the video, they spoke in alternate scenes, and occasionally side by side, never acknowledging the other's existence. But now, no longer are they speaking to us, to the camera, or even to no one, but are bickering with each other. Shedding the role of 'presenter', they step in to take part, openly and subjectively, debating and commenting on the 'subject' of Our Land , the park. As if they had both been itching and seething to comment the whole time, the man's yearning idealism clashes with the woman's acerbic pragmatism, but also emphasizes the standpoint implicit the supposedly objective language both had used earlier in the work. Having cast it off, the two narrators expose the 'presenter' as an emotionless shell, an archetypal character that is temporarily inhabited, cloaked in an air of objectivity and authority."

from the essay, 'What's New? - Televisions Mutual Contract', Chris Fite-Wassilak.