The Breathing Factory: A Globalised Evocation

In 2005, the Republic of Ireland was defined as the ‘most globalised economy in the world’ (A.T. Kearney/Foreign Policy Globalisation Index and IDA Ireland). The significance of this position is amplified by the fact that the South of Ireland never experienced the Industrial Revolution and has thus been propelled from an agricultural-based economy to one defined as ‘post-industrial’. In the absence of critical audio and visual representation of labour, global labour practices and globalised industrial space in the context of such accelerated economic development, this research, both in its methodological design and implementation, stakes out new terrain through the combined use of photography, digital video and ethnographic methods, further engaging with the oral testimony of workers in the multinational location/fieldsite of Hewlett-Packard Manufacturing and Technology Campus outside Dublin at Leixlip, County Kildare. This paper will address both the rationale for the multivocal framework in which this practice-led research project has been undertaken and constructed and its relationship to the resulting installation, The Breathing Factory (Edition Braus 2006).

Mark Curran (b. 1964) lives and works in Berlin and Dublin. He is a PhD candidate through the Centre for Transcultural Research and Media Practice (CTMP), Dublin Institute of Technology and an Associate Lecturer in Photography at the Institute for Art, Design and Technology, Dun Laoghaire, Dublin, Ireland. He lived in Canada for eight years, where he received a BA(Hons) in Sociology and subsequently worked as a social worker. Curran’s previous project, Southern Cross (2002), was published and exhibited internationally. The Breathing Factory (Edition Braus/Belfast Exposed Photography 2006), an outcome of his present postgraduate research, has been widely presented as an installation and most recently was a finalist for the CEDEFOP PhotoMuseum Award 2007 at the Museum of Photography, Thessalonika, Greece. In the Autumn of 2008 it will be installed as part of Septembre de la Photographie in Lyon, France and at the China International Photography Festival in Pingyao, China. Most recently, in June, Curran was a faculty member at the American University in Paris as part of a doctoral summer programme on practice-led research organised by the Steinhardt School for Cultural Studies, New York University. An article addressing his research has just been published in the Journal of Media Practice (UK 2008) and forthcoming publications include NextLevel (Portfolio, UK 2008), Vevey: Villes d’Images (Portfolio, Switzerland, 2008) and Margins: Photographing Labour on the Margins (Dom Foto/IPRN, Slovakia 2008). Curran is also the recipient of an inaugural New Work Visual Arts Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland towards his present research project, one sited in a declining industrialised region of the former East Germany.