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Clare Langan

An excerpt from Clare Langan: The Floating World 

by Declan Long

In Clare Langan’s meditative and mesmeric film installation, The Floating World (2015), Skellig Michael (an island eighteen miles beyond the coast of County Kerry and once an extraordinary site of religious refuge: a place of self-imposed seclusion for Christian monks fleeing to the “inaccessible fringes” of the known world during the dark ages) is also approached with reverent wonder. Captured in disquieting, ‘unreal’ black-and-white infra-red — and presented within a dislocating montage of shifting, separating or mirroring perspectives across three sizable screens — the island is apprehended in insistently other-worldly terms. At the same time, as the title suggests, a definite but ambiguous worldliness underpins its depiction. For in The Floating World, the initial focus on Skellig Michael — followed by studies of evocative territories in the hyper-modern, determinedly globalist city of Dubai and on the Caribbean island of Montserrat — partially arises from troubled reflection on the present and future conditions of our own lived-in, worn-out world. And as we have seen before in Langan’s self-consciously sublime cinematic studies of landscape, nature is here pictured in a manner that heightens both its majesty and menace.

Gradually, as the cameras range across the strange, magnificent Skellig setting, a mood of melancholic unease is established — an atmosphere which is steadily intensified by the low-end rumbles and eerie harmonic drones of Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson’s soundtrack. (Jóhannsson’s beautifully stark music is combined throughout the film with sound pieces by Jana Winderen: compositions often based on field recordings from extreme natural landscapes.) Watching, we might well gain the unsettling sense that this is a world in which something cataclysmic has occured. The way the snow, or what seems to be snow, wafts over the island (seeming at times to fall, then to float into the air again, as if nature’s most fundamental laws of time and space no longer apply) brings to mind descriptions of the devastated earth in Cormac McCarthy’s apocalyptic novel The Road: “The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air.” As the Skellig sequence of The Floating World concludes, we see from a distance and through a dense mist, a tiny, lone figure ascending a narrow path towards one of the island’s peaks. Perhaps, like the monks of Skellig Michael’s distant past, the character is a solitary exile from contemporary chaos. Or, as with the frightening near-future scenario of The Road, this figure might be imagined as a lonely survivor, one of the remaining few. And so, in contrast to the confident belief in humanity’s capacity for survival that characterizes Kenneth Clark’s Civilization, Langan’s film quite possibly brings us to the speculative threshold of a post-human future. In this way the distinctive, dramatic presence of Skellig Michael becomes in The Floating World a landscape offering awe without optimism, beauty without belief. The potential for solace and uplift suggested by pilgrimage to such a hallowed place is, maybe, both yearningly declared and sadly disavowed.

But even if such a recognition is well-grounded — in Langan’s evident alertness to today’s ecological realities, for instance — it is surely too dispiriting and clear-cut a conclusion. For an important effect of Langan’s purposefully open-ended film — with its formal dispersal of fragmented images across a trio of screens, with its commitment to a plural vision of territory, leading viewers from one ostensibly fixed and unique location to another, creating new linkages between zones of geographical and cultural distinction — is that of an enriched, expanded and amplified experience of being in the world.  In the two following sections of The Floating World, we move to entirely dissimilar locations, that are nevertheless explored in terms that connect with the stirring mysteries of the Skellig footage. We see the extravagant skyscraper city of Dubai from above, with the tops of the towering buildings jutting through a bank of thick cloud. With no ground visible below, this might be an audacious futuristic dream: a floating city-world in the clouds. Equally, were it not for the sight of numerous cranes reaching into the sky — suggesting that building work is ongoing and that a particular version of progress continues to apply — these scenes could represent a differently toned and timed sci-fi vision. Monumental presences among the mist — with no urban population visible — these skyscrapers might be the architectural leftovers of a long-lost civilisation: future relics of our own, forever over-reaching, present. (In this regard, these images bring to mind a late scene in Steven Speilberg’s underrated A.I. when the android protagonists fly through the ruins of Manhattan: “the lost city in the sea at the end of the world”.)

There is nothing definitive or dogmatic in Langan’s filmic engagement with this simultaneosly real and unreal location. A final sequence, filmed in Montserrat, appears to be more directly bleak, but it too opens up spaces of engrossing uncertainty. Tracking across unforgiving desert ground, wandering through unwelcoming areas of stalled or abandoned construction, inspecting the trashed rooms of derelict buildings, we are in a world of all-consuming dust. (Notably, Langan read McCarthy’s The Road during her first visit to Montserrat.) Again, however, there is no single way to comprehend our movement through these places. We can trust no straightforward measure of time’s passing. Here and there in this passage of the film, we reflect on the apparent finality suggested by the settled dust. At other points, we see dust rise spectrally from the ground — the film seeming to spool backwards — leaving us to wonder if this implies a situation of reversal or ulimate termination. Is this the beginning of a return to a prior moment of life — and even civilisation — or is this an occasion of absolute finality, of the eventual disappearance of all things? It is, in the end, somewhere between such extreme possibilities, between such contradictory versions of what these visions of the world might mean, that we find ourselves ambiguously located: waiting, dreaming, floating.

References:
A.I., Directed by Steven Speilberg. London: Warner Home Video, 2002. DVD.
Civilisation, Written and presented by Kenneth Clark. London: BBC, 1966. DVD 2005.
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. London: Picador, 2006.
Sebald, W.G. The Rings of Saturn. London: Vintage, 2002.
18.02.2023 – 20.04.2023
At The Gates of Silent Memory
Luan Gallery
Elliot Rd
IRL – Athlone, Co. Westmeath

03.06.2022 – 11.09.2022
TERRA INFIRMA
Kunsthaus Kaufbeuren
Spitaltor 2
87600 Kaufbeuren

25.09.2021 6:00 – 6:45 pm
25.09.2021 4:30 – 5:30 pm

11.05.2019 – 18.05.2019
Master Class and Residency with Bernie Krause
Stiftung Nantesbusch
Werneckstraße 8
80802 München

20.04.2019 – 07.07.2019
Shaping Ireland
National Gallery of Ireland
Merrion Square West
IRL – Dublin 2

09.03.2019 – 24.05.2019
Of Music and Making
Solstice Gallery
Railway Street, Navan
IRL – Co. Meath

28.02.2019 – 10.03.2019
Physical Cinema Festival
Bio Paradis
Hverfisgötu 54
ISL – 101 Reykjavík

15.02.2019
Ritratti di Poesia
Sala del Tempio di Adriano
Piazza di Pietra
ITA – 00186 Roma

26.01.2019 – 17.03.2019
The Gifts of Tony Podesta
American University Museum
Katzen Arts Center
4400 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
USA – Washington, DC 20016

09.06.2018 – 24.06.2018
The Best of Kino Der Kunst
Haciahmet Mahallesi
Irmak Cad. 1-9, Dolapdere
TUR – 33440 Istanbul

23.03.2019 – 11.05.2019
Clare Langan
The Dock
St Georges Terrace, Townparks, Carrick-On-Shannon
IRL – Co. Leitrim, N41 T2X2

09.06.2018 – 24.06.2018
“RECONSTRUCTING EDEN”
A video exhibition curated by Barbara Polla
Together with Paul Ardenne, academic advisor
THE ART CAPITAL FESTIVAL 2018
The ArtMill
2000 Szentendre, Bogdányi utca 32
HUN – SZENTENDRE

25.01.2018 – 13.05.2018
Songs of Peace: Francis Ledwige
Centre Culturel Irlandais
5, rue des Irlandais
FRA – 75005 Paris

28.11.2017 – 20.12.2017
B3 Biennial of the Moving Image
Junghofstrasse 5-9
Frankfurt am Main

Clare Langan will be awarded an honorary doctorate for her achievement in Fine Art from the National University of Ireland. Congratulations!

05.08.2017 – 30.09.2017
Clare Langan at Lismore Castle Arts
Lismore Castle Arts, Waterford
IRL – Co. Waterford,