Thousands are sailing, across the western ocean
Where the land of opportunity, draws tickets in a lottery.
Where e're we go, we celebrate; the land that makes us refugees.
From fear of priests with empty plates, from guilt and weeping effigies.
And we dance.

Thousands are Sailing - phillip chevron

Interruption #7

7 mins, 20 sec
hi 8/digital 8/vhs loop - 1999- 2002
This piece is designed to be listened to on headphones

click here to view interruption #7: quicktime required

eyeballkid@optusnet.com.au

Synopsis

I arrived in Melbourne in 1991 from Dublin aged 16.

Despite being only 90 miles from Belfast, Dublin escaped the troubles except for in 1974. When I tried explaining this to Australians, they couldn't understand that you could have a war in the one part of a country that was so small, life so localised that a war an hour and a half away was not an interest. It took me quite a while to see how absurd it all was.

My father now has created an antennae by stringing a stretch of wire to a gum tree. Now he recieves the RTE news direct from Ireland every evening, completely unedited.

This piece contains the news broadcast concerning the Omagh bomb from 1999, the biggest bomb in the North in the history of the troubles.

There is also footage from the 1974 bombing in Dublin.

Interruption marks this like a dance, how we live through horror, how life goes on.

This piece has undergone several transitions over time, the images here are from the Internationally Unknown Artists show at CCP in 2000.

Thanks to Simon Maidment, Marc Conners & Dominic Redfern.

iian corcoran, 2002.