KEENING
ALARM WILL SOUND
“The video is equally stunning, taking us on a trip from a moment of goodbye between mother and child to a sense of inherited, generational trauma, drawing connections between ideas of geographic and neuronal networks. It's one of the most compelling marriages of music and video I've seen.” – Wise Music
KEENING is a visual work created for Alarm Will Sound’s recording of Donnacha Dennehy’s The Hunger, a work exploring the emotional, political, and socioeconomic devastation of Ireland’s Great Famine.
The libretto draws principally from rare first-hand accounts by American humanitarian Asenath Nicholson, who traveled to Ireland to document the conditions she encountered during the famine.
Inspired by this historical testimony, I developed a visual language that connects the documentation of collective catastrophe with my own explorations of inherited trauma. Images move between abstraction, landscape, the body, and fragments of historical memory, creating a space where the past is felt as something both distant and carried forward.
The resulting video treats memory not as a fixed record, but as something unstable and transmissible — appearing, dissolving, and resurfacing through image, sound, and movement.
Project Credits
Composer:
Donnacha Dennehy
Creative and Art Direction:
Deborah Johnson
Performance:
Alarm Will Sound
TouchDesigner Programming:
Louise Lessél
3D Modeler :
Yuhao Yang
Producer:
Nonesuch Records
Year:
2019