“Your path led through the sea, your way through the mighty waters, but your footprints were not to be found”

 

I once wrote a poem called ‘The Merits of Tracer Fire’ in the mid-1990s (we used the title for a very different Abridged project many years later) which was essentially about how, during The Troubles, I’d only hear of towns, when something terrible happened there. For a moment place A or B was at the forefront of my consciousness and then would disappear again. I’m remarkably ignorant of local geographies now, and I was even more so growing up. I got the bus to Buncrana (a town in Donegal) when I was a kid and to Belfast city centre in my mid/late teens and that was essentially it. My world was very small. I thought it would be interesting to explore these landscapes ‘where bad things happened’ today as what occurred then still echoes now. I have lived in quite a few places in quite a few countries and the internet has given us (virtual) access to everywhere but as I’ve got older I find my world is still pretty small and I still don’t know where most of the places that will feature in this residency are. I’m not mentioning what exactly happened in the towns pictured and the places shown aren’t exactly where the bad thing happened. It just an attempt to reconnect with fleeting moments of atrocity as seen through the eyes of a 1970s/80s TV watching kid in an equally shallow manner using Google Earth. Nostalgia is a Loaded Gun as it were. A Troubled Tourist. A Ghost Revisiting.