Uimhir a Cúig was launched back in December 2013 with a collaboration between the celebrated Irish writer Kevin Barry and the Galway artist and film maker Louise Manifold – On Being There and Not Being There; or Cotard’s Delusion, A Case Study featuring text/voiceover by Barry & video by Manifold.
As Barry wrote at the time: “This is a piece I wrote to go with a video and audio installation for an artist called Louise Manifold in Galway based on Cotard’s Delusion — a rare mental state in which you wake up one morning and believe yourself to be dead. It was apparently Cotard’s that inspired Beckett’s The Calmative. Louise filmed the interior of a derelict old cinema in New Jersey — as good a locale to define a state of living death as any!”
It was interesting therefore to happen upon, in the latest issue of The Honest Ulsterman (founded in 1968 by the late James Simmons – recently featured in Uimhir A Cúig), Maeve Mulrennan speaking to Kevin and Louise about their collaboration including details of their more recent work together.
Enjoy the article – while it contains a link to the video including voiceover, the printed text is only available here at Uimhir a Cúig .
—Gerard Beirne