Dark Fog

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The Exhibition

Dark Fog was an exhibition presented at the Pumphouse, Dublin Port.

In 2022, I received funding from the Arts Council to develop a new body of work about transitional experiences of citizenship and migration – why people are leaving and why people are coming – and how we can address mental mid-states of ‘not-having-arrived-yet’, or, perhaps ‘never-really-arriving’. I invited various speakers/performers and participants from diverse backgrounds to NCAD to join me in a mapping workshop day based on the following questions: What does it mean to belong; to feel home; to have a voice; to feel connected to our ancestors?

My vision for this show was to create an experimental art work about the psychological points of transition, where the Pumphouse as an industrial sanctuary becomes a space of possibility, a welcoming place that offers capacity to navigate the dark fog, with a sort of wayfinding akin to seafarers reaching the port. In the site-specific installation, mappings of paths, crossroads, and what holds us along the way, flow into one another and through various veiled fabric pieces, almost as if obscured by dark fog. “Real life” plays between that curtain landscape, where we get glimpses of what it means ‘to cross’; when that moment of realisation hits us – ‘we made it’.

The Launch

At the launch, I was in short informal conversations with writer and performer Denis Kehoe about the 4 pieces/themes of the exhibition, and we concluded with the music of Ines Khai after each.

Ines’ song responses to my works were:

1. Belonging to a community: Méné mwen alé (“take me with you/take me in” about getting to a new place and becoming part of the community)

2. To feel home in places and languages: Péké mò (“won’t die” it’s about the idea of refusing to live and die feeling like an outsider, finding a way to feel home)

3. To have a voice: Tonbé lévé (“to fall and stand back up” about keeping advocating for oneself through difficult times)

4.Ancestral connections to land and sea: Mistè Lanmè la (“the mystery of the sea” about the ancestors who were thrown off the boats going from Africa to the Caribbean, about remembering them and about a difficult relationship of fear and fascination with the sea)

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Bios

Silvia Loeffler is an artist, researcher and educator who works across disciplines to map the psychology of a space and its people. Her arts practice is based on collaborations with community members to create layered, site-specific installations that honour the participants’ sense of place and their emotional responses to their environment.

Denis Kehoe is a writer, performer and lecturer in the School of Visual Culture at the National College of Art & Design in Dublin. He is currently working on a fourth novel, as well as a series of multi-faceted projects that relate to it, including From Balbriggan to Bray, a cycle of promenade performances and photographic engagements with the Dublin coastline.

Ines Khai is a Guadeloupean artist based in Dundalk, Ireland. As a singer-songwriter, she has developed her own distinctive sound which is an absorbing mix of Guadeloupean traditional music (Gwoka), soul and blues. She sings of the salt and the water, the mystery of the ocean and the memory of loved ancestors. Her first book, Child of the Sea, also explores these themes in the form of a tale for dreamers of all ages.