Text by Pádraig Timoney
December 2020
Declan Clarke, Group Portrait with Explosives, 2014
16mm film and HD video, digital transfer. 42 min 24 sec
Courtesy the artist
The premise of Declan Clarke's film Group Portrait with Explosives (2014) is Clarke’s own piecing together of a historically much-less trumpeted ‘globalization’; of a trade between non-NATO states, evidenced in three industrial products (Zetor tractors, guns and Semtex explosives, all from the manufacturing base of the former Czechoslovakia) appearing within a specific area of the North of Ireland during the Troubles of early 70s, 80s and 90s.
On childhood and adolescent family trips from his hometown of Dublin, Clarke often went to visit the farm of close relatives on his mother's side in South Armagh. Going to see the relations, a most natural journey, meant crossing the border, and soon provoked a wrenching curiosity into the situation of the border areas of Ireland. In widening thematic terms, what is the lived-reality of residents local to geographical border lines drawn by colonial powers, in expediency, negotiation or avarice, through previously coherent sociopolitical situations?
I recently met Declan as I moved to Berlin and having seen some of this work, this one resonated in particular. The conditions described in Declan’s film were also the conditions of my own border-crossing childhood and youth in the North, from 1968 to 1987.
The film has a particular texture, due to the source material; archival footage and documentation from the 1960s-1980s, interspersed with shots of both Ireland and Czech Republic in contemporary settings. There is a mundanity and familiar simplicity to the material which itself appears very disarming — family footage, photographs, sunlight filtering across the tractors in a Brno showroom —so refreshing after the aesthetic hectoring of advertising footage. The light in the showroom and the archive photos as matter of fact and mysterious as the available light necessary to film the Armagh countryside.
The film’s collage, live-shot and with contemplative space for the resonance of the voice-over, reminds me of something of Derek Jarman; the allowance of the imagery to build its own strangeness. It’s a sort of imaginative listening for what is revealed or left unsaid in the ground level huddles underneath the unceasing ideological broadcast of a colonial narrative; local and lived stories, which, in their very uniqueness and particularity, are also universalised. The phrase 'Group Portrait with Explosives' is an innovative description by rhythm, mention and inference of ‘the conditions' and what the options, in those conditions, turn out to be.
— Pádraig Timoney, December 2020