Early next month the Complex arts centre, in the markets area of central Dublin, will be transformed into an experimental cinema. This is for Dissolutions, a new moving-image festival highlighting the increasing amount of work being made across Ireland.
There will be screenings, workshops and artist talks, including a 16mm workshop with the Spanish artist and film-maker Laida Lertxundi, as well as events curated by Jenny Brady, Ruairí McCann, Alice Quinn Banville and Helena Gouveia Monteiro. The festival includes a focus on Palestinian cinema and on work from the North of Ireland. There will also be an evening of psychedelic film-making.
The festival is led by Aemi, an initiative founded by Alice Butler and Daniel Fitzpatrick in 2016 to support and screen experimental film. “Daniel and I worked together in various other ways through the IFI, the Experimental Film Club and Plastik [a festival of artists’ moving image], which Daniel was a curator for when I was working at the IFI at the time,” says Butler. “Really, all of those things, as well as a meeting that was called the Critical Forum – which there’s a Dublin and Cork branch of but was started in London – compelled us to think that an organisation was needed and could be genuinely useful.”
While experimental moving image is often encountered in gallery or installation contexts, Aemi has always been about showing work “in a cinema or in an event-based way,” says Butler, “bringing people together to watch work from start to finish, and always trying to have a social aspect of it where there’s direct contact between audiences and artists”.
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Aemi has previously partnered with the IFI; Gaze; Docs Ireland, in Belfast; and Cork International Film Festival. Last weekend Aemi screened its touring Spirit Messages programme with the Shankill Screen, an experimental film entity at Vault Artist Studios, on Shankill Road in Belfast. Aemi is primarily funded by the Arts Council, which, with Screen Ireland, also supports the Dissolutions festival.
The main impetus for Dissolutions, says Fitzpatrick, “was a feeling that there was just a lot of energy happening in the area of experimental film practice and artist film, not only in terms of people making work but of different people programming work too, [the experimental DIY film night] Fanvid creating new platforms. There was all this energy. We thought it would be useful to create a platform for that energy.”
Over the past six months, according to Fitzpatrick, they’ve seen “a massive increase in artists coming to us for the first time”. The field of experimental moving image, he says, is increasingly diversifying, more people are entering the field, more people are making work and more are getting funded. A catalyst for this has, in part, been the Arts Council’s agility award – a support mentioned time and again by emerging artists.
The award, which can be up to €5,000, is a stream of council funding that cuts across multiple disciplines, an almost accidental but now influential legacy of pandemic-era funding. Targeted at artists for developing their practice, work or skills, it has broadened the scope and number of artists applying to the Arts Council, with a big impact on emerging artists or artists who had not yet found a route to Arts Council funding.
Emerging experimental film artists “might access an agility award, and will hopefully be able to scale that up to project awards”, says Fitzpatrick, referring to a bigger strand of Arts Council funding. “We’d like to see people be able to carve out a career. We just launched a Developing Your Practice as a Film Artist programme, which mentors people in a more long-form way. That allows us to do more, and shape their building of their career, so that they can continue to access funding and have some longevity. That’s the main thing we’ve seen, this opening up of practice.”
Butler says there is a real appetite for Irish work internationally. “About 10 years ago it was rare enough for someone to identify that they were keen as artists to engage with the film-festival circuit. Even though, at that stage, artist film festivals were thriving on an international level, Irish work wasn’t being seen there; it wasn’t travelling. Part of the work we tried to do is advocate for Irish work, and strategise about who we invite to screenings.”
This has included inviting international programmers to view Irish work. In 2022 Aemi and Sirius Arts Centre, in Cobh in Co Cork, commissioned Frank Sweeney, who was then emerging as an experimental film artist. Earlier this year he won a prestigious Tiger Short Award, for his film Few Can See, at International Film Festival Rotterdam.
From their conversations with artists, says Fitzpatrick, “something that would be really useful is an artist cinema or micro-cinema space where events could take place on a more frequent basis”. This booming experimental work, often supported by Aemi, along with entities such as Fanvid, is extraordinarily vibrant but also effectively nomadic. Fanvid books space at Unit44, in Stoneybatter in Dublin. A dedicated experimental and artist cinema space in Dublin is long overdue – not an art-house cinema but a place to exhibit experimental moving-image work and be a hub for the artist community creating such work. Given how much vacant commercial space the capital has, there are obvious opportunities for this to happen as the next stage for a burgeoning scene.
Dissolutions is at the Complex, Dublin 7, on Friday, September 6th, and Saturday, September 7th
