Exploring collective healing through place observation and filmmaking
Lilo is a city-person who has become a sweet looking melancholic monster because he still hasn’t found what he is looking for. He arrived in Huntly from the metropolis looking for his estranged loved one who abandoned him for reasons he is trying to figure out. He loves G dearly. He walks day and night looking for G to no avail. His heart is broken.
Irineu Destourelles created the outline of a character, Lilo, and through him he proposed to reflect on issues of loss and claustrophobia versus expansiveness in relation to the urban space. Lilo – a flawed individual – arrives in an urban space with a history, a place in a perpetual state of change because of the priorities of those who live in it. He attempts to learn to love himself through hopeful encounters with the new. Through this character, Irineu made a moving image work that had benefited from a series of community interventions centred around the notion of self-healing. A concern with in-betweenness, hybridity and individual instability features prominently in Irineu’s practice, which is underpinned by a speculative treatment of postcolonial identity as an unsettled and paradoxical construct.
In dialogue with residents who have in recent years relocated to Huntly from cities across the UK and elsewhere, Irineu questioned in what ways the town is colonised by the values that drive the city, and, more importantly, whether the rural town of today is a place for self-healing for those who escape to them. Huntly’s rural location and close proximity to prosperous Aberdeen make it a sought after place to live in. In a recent survey, within the auspices of a strategic development plan, the residents expressed that they are comfortable with the town’s sense of identity, and ranked as their highest priorities the creation of new businesses and the regeneration of the historic buildings in the town centre. Irineu questioned if in some ways Huntly is a space in-between the rural and the urban, and how community identity/identities is/are embedded in the public space.
This project was part of Deveron Projects’ Culture Collective project, The School of Vernacular Skills.
