Blinded by the very force it imagined it could handle

Overview

Blinded by the very force it imagined it could handle is a film from Donovan Wylie and Peter Mann, which contains never before seen footage from the demolition of the Maze Prison in 2007. It builds on work done by Wylie as part of his landmark exhibition The Maze (2004) – which was first shown at Belfast Exposed – that saw Wylie given access to the Maze/Long Kesh Prison site as in stood empty, but kept ready for future use, in Northern Ireland’s post-Good Friday Agreement political landscape. By this time, the Maze had become a location synonymous with the Trouble, due to its role in holding ‘special category’ prisons with links to paramilitary organisations and as the site of the infamous Hunger Strikes of the early 1980s. It was arguably one of the most famous prisons in the world. Despite having been emptied in the years following the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, the site was maintained and kept in readiness for several years, prepared in case conflict returned. It cast a long shadow over the early years of post-Good Friday Agreement Northern Ireland, as the first steps towards devolved, power-sharing government were being made.

It was in this context that Wylie was given free, unsupervised access to the Maze in order to document the site. His images captured both the physical structure of the prison, as well as the psychological impact of the Maze’s architecture. The Maze brought Wylie widespread critical acclaim and was a powerful documentation of living history in Northern Ireland. In 2007, Donovan Wylie and filmmaker Peter Mann recorded the demolition of an internal perimeter wall of the Maze/Long Kesh Prison, as part of Wylie’s work to document the demolition of the site following the prison’s final closure. It is this, previously unseen, work that forms the basis of Blinded by the very force it imagined it could handle.

For a detailed account of the exhibition see Slavka Sverakova on Visual Art: https://slavkasverakova.blogspot.com/2023/07/blinded-by-very-very-force-it-imagined.html

Lead creatives

Donovan Wylie and Peter Mann (artists, photography and editing)
Paula McFetridge (narrator, reading excerpts of ‘The Iliad or the Poem of Force’ by Simone Weil)
Deirdre Robb (producer for Belfast Exposed)
Declan Keeney (post production producer)
Michael McKnight (sound designer)

Collaborating Organisation(s)

Belfast Exposed

Bank Gallery

Targeted groups

Cross Community, Unionist and Loyalist, Nationalist and Republican, Ex-Combatants, Wider Society, Prisoners & Ex-Prisoners.

Since moving to the Cathedral Quarter in 2003, Belfast Exposed has engaged with tens of thousands of people every year: photographers, artists, activists, local communities, tourists, students, young people, and the general public. Each group has contributed to a substantial portfolio of exhibitions, publications and projects, often informed by questions that resonate with local experience: representation, identity, history, memory, commemoration and attachment to place.

Funders

Arts Council Northern Ireland

Belfast City Council Cultural Fund

Key aims and rationale

Donovan Wylie continues to chronicle the architecture of conflict. His work is rooted in the idea of art as an antidote to the nihilism that conflict can induce, and was influenced by his experiences as a child growing up during the Troubles (Wylie was born in Belfast in 1971). In Blinded by the very force it imagined it could handle, the scenes of the demolition are directed so that at different moments, the viewer feels oppressed by the wall of the Maze, and then paradoxically protected by it. The almost overwhelming sound as the wall is destroyed evokes Wylie’s childhood memories of sleep broken by explosions in the city, and the destruction of the wall creates a space into which a sense of peace emerges. The film features excerpts of Simone Weil’s ‘The Iliad or the Poem of Force’, read by Paula McFetridge.

“Sometimes there is a moment where you feel safe enough to look back, you have travelled far enough to gain some perspective, and confident enough not to go back to broken sleep but awake, clear and conscious. In 2006 I was the only person given full access to photograph and film the demolition of the Maze/Long Kesh prison. A place I had come to know incredibly well since I started photographing it in 2001 and a place that loomed large in my childhood. It felt essential to do it, but in the months and years that followed finding the right way to show it became harder and harder. Showing this work for the first time, 15 years after it was photographed, feels something like this new clarity….and so within our full grasp” – Donovan Wylie (2022)

Belfast Exposed also used Blinded by the very force it imagined it could handle as an opportunity to publicly open the Bank Gallery, a new complex of exhibitions and event spaces and artist studios on Belfast’s High Street. This was the first public event held in the Bank Gallery.

Key peace-related issues

Conflicted Histories, Violence and Trauma, Historical and Transitional Justice

Interrogating complex issues of conflict and history, using film shot during the demolition of the Maze, a place deeply associated with the Troubles and that appeared to have been made obsolete by the Good Friday Agreement, Blinded by the very force it imagined it could handle gives a new clarity and perspective on both the Agreement and the world it created.

Linked or legacy projects

https://www.academia.edu/9690307/Entering_the_Maze_Space_Time_and_Exclusion_in_an_Abandoned_Northern_Ireland_Prison

https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10044024/1/Kelly_10044024_thesis.pdf

https://theeyes.eu/wp-content/uploads/te9_v2-03_full_gb.pdf

https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/51177/1/Tamsin%20Silvey%20PhD%20Thesis%20Conflict-Photography-Exhibition%20Vol%201%20Texts%20amended.pdf

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/08/colin-graham-30-years-ireland-review

https://www.sitesofconscience.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/211440-Troubles-Beyond-Curating-Conflict-Book_WEB.pdf

http://www.miriad.mmu.ac.uk/visualculture/locationmemory/conference2004/Handbook.pdf

https://www.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/what-was-on/outposts-donovan-wylie

Northern Ireland: 30 Years of Photography