This is our news page and will contain information about our publications, exhibitions, projects, misadventures and romantic misunderstandings
03rd October 2011
November will see the launch of abridged 0 – 23: Desire and Dust & Abridged 0 – 20: Abandoned Clare. More details very soon.
09th October 2011
Abridged 0 – 23: Desire and Dust launched at 6pm Thursday 03rd November 2011, at the Golden Thread Gallery, Gt. Patrick Street, Belfast. More news soon…
09th October 2011
Abridged at the Festival of Britain. Poem from our Magnolia issue by Geraldine Mitchell.
October 17th 2011
Abridged 0 – 23: Desire and Dust:
Shlomit Migay, Geraldine Mitchell, Clare Samuel, Maeve O’Sullivan, Therese Mac an Airchinnigh, Frank Sewell, Fiona Ní Mhaoilir, Simon Jones, Simone Haack, Jessamine O Connor, Miriam de Búrca, Kate Braverman, Moyra Donaldson, Howie Good, Ackroyd & Harvey, Fernando Smith, Sarah Stevens, David Mohan, Eleanor Bennett, Kate Dempsey, Seamus Harahan, Janet Smith, Giles Newington, Vong Phaophanit & Claire Oboussier, Christopher Barnes, Jason Lee Lovell, Kelli Allen, Kathleen McCracken, Heather Gray, Gerald Dawe, Theo Sims, Nicholas Bielby, J. S. Robinson, Helena Nolan, Jenny Keane, Simon Evans.
The issue will be launched in Golden Thread Gallery, Patrick Street, Belfast @ 6pm, Thursday 03rd November 2011. Hope to see you there…
October 22nd 2011
Desire and Dust has gone to print. We’re rather pleased with the result. Hopefully you will be too. Join us at the launch at the Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast 6pm Thurs Nov 3rd and collect a copy….
October 25th 2011
Now that Abridged 0 – 23: Desire and Dust is at the printers we can concentrate on Abridged 0 – 20: Abandoned Clare. For those wondering about the numbering system see our FAQs. Anyway here’s another hint of 0 – 20:
We should have Desire and Dust in our hands by the end of the month and very excited we are about that. More news very soon.
November 05th 2011
Thanks to everyone who came to the Desire and Dust launch. We had a great time. We hope you did too. Watch this space for more news.
November 10th 2011
Desire and Dust is now available at most of Belfast’s galleries plus the Linen Hall and Central Libraries as well as Bookfinders cafe. Copies will be made available in Dublin from tomorrow. Alternatively simply download an issue from this website. It’s free and easy. As they say. We’ll have news on Abridged 0 – 20: Abandoned Clare very soon.
November 16th 2011
Abridged 0 – 20: Abandoned Clare Exhibition launch X-PO Clare 27.11.11. More Details Soon. Abridged 0 – 25: Silence Submission Call 03.12.11. We welcome Susanna Galbraith to the Abridged fold.
November 22nd 2011
Abridged 0 – 20: Abandoned Clare with Deirdre O’Mahony opening at the X-PO, Kilnaboy, Clare on Sun 27th November 2011 from 12 – 2pm. Exhibition runs until December 16th. An Abridged publication, 0 – 20 will be available in Clare and Derry and a pdf will be available as a free download on this website soon.
November 29th 2011
The 0 – 25 Silence Submission Call will be made very soon. Watch this space and our Facebook page. 0 – 20 is available as a free downloadable Pdf on the Abandoned Clare page. The exhibition runs in Kilnaboy, Clare until 16th December. We’ve become aware that Google Chrome is causing some difficulties in terms of layout when viewing this site that aren’t occurring with Internet Explorer 8, Firefox, Safari etc. We’ll try and rectify this as soon as we can.
November 30th 2011
Abridged 0-25: Silence Submission Call
To those who have ever known sound, true silence can be but a myth. It is a phantasm, and something to be feared, for in silence we are vulnerable to our own conscience and its persistent echoes of memory, desire and confusion; we lose the means of dismissal and voluntary ignorance and become vulnerable. In silence we are naked, stripped of the sound layers we have used to define ourselves to outside eyes, a defensive muffling of truths. Today we abjure silence, avoiding its solitude. We are in a constant conversation with an ultra-social and info-overdosed humanity repeatedly relaying sculptures of mundane phrases that numb us to the experience of meaning. We dare not lie still enough to stir or coax the phantom film reels of our past from their shadows. Instead we light fires, shouting and stamping our feet to drive back the dark and its inhabitants. It is our fear of the silence of the void, the vacuum. Humanity cannot see nothingness but we run from it, choking the subtle sound of our own breathing with the bustling of contemporary life where everything is virtual and reality utterly abandoned. We convince ourselves we grow by sponging up the noises of the clattering world that engulfs us. In silence we are trapped as we are made to face the cold starkness of what we feel is missing, or the fierce jab of what we long to erase. We stand in silence and we stand in a room of mirrors. A ticking clock is a heartbeat.
Abridged, the poetry/art magazine is looking for submissions for its Silence issue. A maximum of 3 poems may be submitted of any length. Art can be up to A4 size and can be in any media. It should be at least 300 dpi. Submissions can be emailed to abridged@ymail.com or posted to: Abridged c/o The Verbal Arts Centre, Stable Lane and Mall Wall, Bishop Street Within, Derry BT48 6PU. Closing date for submission is Jan 14th 2012.
…lay me down the long white line, leave the silence far behind…
December 02nd 2011
We’re still investigating the Chrome formatting problems. It seems to be a case of Chrome not recognising particular fonts. It is irritating in that it looks like we’ve been lazy with our formatting. At any rate the proper formatting can be seen with IE8, Safari etc. The exhibition 0 – 20: Abandoned Clare is on at the X-PO Kilnaboy until 16th. December. The Pdf is available as a free download from this site.
December 20th 2011
Well, 2011 as been an Abridged year so to speak. We’ve been busy. 0 – 22: Nostalgia is a Loaded Gun, 0 – 23: Desire and Dust and 0 – 20: Abandoned Clare (in that order) were published. Clare saw our second exhibition. We finally got around to producing our website and making the issues available as free Pdf downloads. The website has proved very popular. We thank you for all your support. 2012 will see us continue apace. 0 – 25: Silence will be out in Feb/Mar and 0 -26: Rust will surface in May/June. We’ve other projects planned which we’ll announce when the time comes. Watch this space. We’ll put the early issues of the Abridged and its precursor the ‘Chancer’ on the website in the early new year. At least the copies that we still possess. We’ll do our best to obtain the copies we don’t. We wish you a happy Christmas from Abridged HQ.
January 04th 2012
Happy New Year. Lots of Abridged activity in 2012. We’ll keep you posted. Don’t forget the Abridged 0 – 25: Silence submission call ends on 14th January.
To those who have ever known sound, true silence can be but a myth. It is a phantasm, and something to be feared, for in silence we are vulnerable to our own conscience and its persistent echoes of memory, desire and confusion; we lose the means of dismissal and voluntary ignorance and become vulnerable. In silence we are naked, stripped of the sound layers we have used to define ourselves to outside eyes, a defensive muffling of truths. Today we abjure silence, avoiding its solitude. We are in a constant conversation with an ultra-social and info-overdosed humanity repeatedly relaying sculptures of mundane phrases that numb us to the experience of meaning. We dare not lie still enough to stir or coax the phantom film reels of our past from their shadows. Instead we light fires, shouting and stamping our feet to drive back the dark and its inhabitants. It is our fear of the silence of the void, the vacuum. Humanity cannot see nothingness but we run from it, choking the subtle sound of our own breathing with the bustling of contemporary life where everything is virtual and reality utterly abandoned. We convince ourselves we grow by sponging up the noises of the clattering world that engulfs us. In silence we are trapped as we are made to face the cold starkness of what we feel is missing, or the fierce jab of what we long to erase. We stand in silence and we stand in a room of mirrors. A ticking clock is a heartbeat.
Abridged, the poetry/art magazine is looking for submissions for its Silence issue. A maximum of 3 poems may be submitted of any length. Art can be up to A4 size and can be in any media. It should be at least 300 dpi. Submissions can be emailed to abridged@ymail.com or posted to: Abridged c/o The Verbal Arts Centre, Stable Lane and Mall Wall, Bishop Street Within, Derry BT48 6PU. Closing date for submission is Jan 14th 2012.
…lay me down the long white line, leave the silence far behind…
January 10th 2012
A review of Abridged 0 – 20: Abandoned Clare in the Irish Times:
A number of photographers are focusing on abandoned homes and workplaces, applying a documentary style that allows the true narrative to shine, writes AIDAN DUNNE
CAMILO JOSE Vergara’s benchmark project American Ruins , published in book form by Merrell in 1999, is a sequential photographic documentation of abandoned, decaying and disappearing tracts of urban North America. Not America of the dim distant past, but America now, in our own era.
It’s a brilliant, pioneering example of what might be called the archaeology of modernity. Vergara’s images vividly demonstrate that when economic activity fluctuates, so do populations and the entire architectural infrastructure they inhabit – an infrastructure that so easily creates the illusion of permanence.
This fact is also evident in another more recent work, The Ruins of Detroit , by two French photographers, Yves Marchand and Romain Jeffre, published by Steidl at the end of 2010. Over the previous five years the two visited Detroit, as the car industry there continued a long period of decline, recording the staggering scale of decay, not just of the industrial landscape but also of the wider municipal, commercial and cultural fabric of the monumental city.
Two recent Irish publications can be seen in the light of these renowned exemplars. Deirdre O’Mahony’sAbandoned Clare (Abridged) and David Creedon’s Ghosts of the Faithful Departed (Collins) both consider local instances of dereliction and decay.
Abandoned Clare, which has a magazine format, comes under the umbrella of Abridged, an ambitious “art/poetry initiative” based in Derry and active since 2004, with some 23 projects notched up to date, with Gregory McCartney as project co-ordinator.
O’Mahony’s photographic exploration of abandoned sites in Co Clare, together with a short introductory text, forms a compelling portrait of small-town and rural Ireland at a particularly testing time.
It is not an exercise in nostalgia, though there is inevitably an elegiac quality to some of the stories that emerge, such as that of Paddy Cahir from Rinnamona, whose repertoire of practical and craft skills was truly exceptional.
We see his stone-built workshop, inside and out, at Kilnaboy in images that concisely convey a wealth of information about a time, a way of life, an individual, a family and a community. Several unoccupied houses are depicted, in varying stages of dereliction. There are the remains of a co-operative mushroom farm at Tubber, and a lace-making factory, pre- and post-demolition, at Ennistymon. Abandoned schools indicate a dwindling population.
O’Mahony, an artist whose projects are generally site-specific, set out not to lament “a lost utopian past but to stimulate, provoke and provide evidence of other ways of doing things”. Set against such symbols of economic decline as photographs of a closed travel agents and a ghost estate, this suggestion may seem a little perverse, but it is borne out by the work.
The photographs show a world in transition, as detailed by Vergara, referring to the historical layers underlying what we see now. They also confront us as questions about what might form, in O’Mahony’s words, “a sustainable future for rural communities”.
She first exhibited the photographs in X-PO in Kilnaboy last year, a venue she established in 2007 to cater for cultural and social activities and projects of several community groups . Abandoned Clare, she notes, elicited an extraordinary response from its local audience, so the project doesn’t end with the publication but will continue. The original photographs and a related archive can be seen at X-PO.
More lavish and conventional in form and presentation, Ghosts of the Faithful Departed is a substantial, handsome hardback. It has its genesis, Creedon writes, in his chance discovery of an abandoned house when he was a passenger in a car driving through rural Co Sligo. “For no reason, I asked my friend to stop the car.” He found the house was being used as an animal shelter. Upstairs, amid remnants of occupancy, he discovered a pink dress still hanging in a wardrobe.
The experience set him on a two-year quest to find and photograph the interiors of similarly abandoned dwellings. Often they contained remnants of their prior inhabitants, not just furniture and the ubiquitous picture of the sacred heart, but personal items such as clothing, cardboard suitcases, letters and souvenirs.
Each house enshrines a story or, rather, some fragments of a story. Often the story relates to emigration but not in the obvious sense. Instead, Creedon sees the departed occupants as having been, mostly, those left behind, or returned emigrants.
Hence a foreword by Dr Breda Grey, who has compiled “an oral archive of interviews with people who had stayed in Ireland in the 1950s”.
Creedon is a fine professional photographer with a conventional pictorial aesthetic (he currently features in the Taylor Wessing Photographic Prize exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London). Ghosts of the Faithful Departed contains many strong images of dilapidated interiors, yet there is a distinctly theatrical quality to the framing and lighting that often gives the photographs the feeling of being commercial assignments. Is there any harm in tending towards a pictorially contrived rendering of the past? The book will probably strike a chord with quite a wide audience and has the potential to be popular.
Yet it’s interesting that the work of Vergara, Marchand and Jeffre and, in Abandoned Clare, O’Mahony, doesn’t try to ratchet up the emotion of the subject matter at all. In fact they consistently step back and aim for a high level of pictorial objectivity. In this they exemplify and reflect a major strand of modern and contemporary art and documentary photography.
And despite this, in allowing the subject matter to speak for itself, as it were, leaving it free from the emotionally expressive aspirations of the photographer, they don’t drain their material of emotion.
The emotion is still there, but we are freer to make multiple interpretations of the images, to read them as looking to the future rather than as being consigned to a closed narrative of a distant past.
Abandoned Clare by Deirdre O’Mahony, published by Abridged is available at X-PO, Kilnaboy and from deomahony@gmail.com and abridged@ymail.com
January 20th 2012
Thanks for all the submissions we received for 0 – 25: Silence. The response was very impressive. We’ll get back to everyone eventually. If you don’t make it into this issue remember that 0 – 26: Rust will have its submission call in March. We’ll have more details soon. Watch this space and our Facebook and Twitter pages.
February 06th 2012
As we are aware that many people want to discover more about Abridged contributors we’ve linked as many to their respective websites as was possible. We can’t vouch for how up-to-date these sites are but at least it’s a start. If you are a contributor and we haven’t a link to you or have an out-of-date link let us know at abridged@ymail.com and we will rectify that. We should say again that this site is best viewed with anything rather than Google.
February 12th 2012
Silence is falling very soon. Abridged 0 – 25 will be launched at the Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast on Thurs 1st March. Contributors for this issue are Mark Janssen; Darran Anderson; Aoife Mannix; Jennifer Trouton; Graham Nunn; Aileen Kelly; Nuala Ní Chonchúir; Katie Holten; Giles Newington; Colin Darke; Matt Kirkham; Mark O’Flynn; Jan Harris; Stephen Porter; Sara O’Gorman; Peter Goulding; Mary McIntyre; David Mohan; Ethna O’Regan; Sheri Kocher Campbell; David Calcutt; Fergus Jordan; Matt Hetherington; Michele O’Sullivan; Skye Loneragan; Olive Broderick; Pavel Buchler; Moyra Donaldson; Zoe Murdoch; Eve Golden Woods; Brendan O’Neill; Vivien Jones; Lynda Tavakoli; Benjamin de Burca. More news soon.
February 21st 2012
Abridged 0 – 25: Silence will be launched at the Golden Thread Gallery, Gt. Patrick Street, Belfast on Thursday 01st March 2012 @ 6pm. Come a long and say hello. There’s the new issue to be had, exhibitions to see and a fun time for all. Well we’ll have fun. Hopefully you will too. The new issue contains: Mark Janssen; Darran Anderson; Aoife Mannix; Jennifer Trouton; Graham Nunn; Aileen Kelly; Nuala Ní Chonchúir; Katie Holten; Giles Newington; Colin Darke; Matt Kirkham; Mark O’Flynn; Jan Harris; Stephen Porter; Sara O’Gorman; Peter Goulding; Mary McIntyre; David Mohan; Ethna O’Regan; Sheri Kocher Campbell; David Calcutt; Fergus Jordan; Matt Hetherington; Michele O’Sullivan; Skye Loneragan; Olive Broderick; Pavel Buchler; Moyra Donaldson; Zoe Murdoch; Eve Golden Woods; Brendan O’Neill; Vivien Jones; Lynda Tavakoli; Benjamin de Burca.
Also for your entertainment:
Drawing inspiration from the 1924 Russian propaganda animation of the same name, Interplanetary Revolution is a project that will include at least two new simultaneous group exhibitions and the installation/reworking of another. Looking at failing/ed ideologies; notions of otherworldliness and the uncanny; and revolutionary critique, Interplanetary Revolution will be an opportunity to collapse a few assumptions and undermine previous relationships.
And
Patria Interiore / Inner Homeland
ALESSANDRO CANNISTRÀ | ILARIA LOQUENZI | EMILIANO MAGGI
STEFANO MINZI | LUANA PERILLI | MOIRA RICCI | ALESSANDRO ROSA
BEATRICE SCACCIA
curated by Manuela Pacella
For an exhibition in the Project space of the Golden Thread Gallery, a group of eight young Italian artists will confront the issue of “Inner homeland” – a quote from volume 5 of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, The Prisoner.
Amongst the many themes of À la recherche du temps perdu, nostalgia and involuntary memory are explored, and these themes have also been prevalent in the works of many Italian artists. Since 2001, Italy has seen many works that have investigated notions of shared memory and a common past, such as the documentary Un’ora sola ti vorrei by Alina Marazzi.
The artists that have been invited to participate in this exhibition can be divided into three groups. Firstly, those who are working in an explicit manner on the subject of memory, both private and collective, such as Stefano Minzi, Luana Perilli, Moira Ricci and Beatrice Scaccia. Secondly, those who approach memory obliquely, such as Ilaria Loquenzi with her participatory works and Alessandro Rosa’s universal linguistic codes, and thirdly, Alessandro Cannistrà and Emiliano Maggi whose works reference ancestral and archetypical memories.
The exhibited works are across a range of media including: photography; video; painting; engraving; and installation and includes original works specifically designed for this exhibition by Cannistrà, Loquenzi, Maggi, Rosa and Scaccia.
March 12th 2012
0 – 25: Silence will be available from Belfast galleries and arts centres this week and in Galway and Dublin very soon. We should say again that this site is best viewed with anything other than Google Chrome.
Abridged 0 – 26: Rust Submission Call
The passage of time makes abrasive records on steel flesh. The air whips our iron bodies and breaks our sense of power. Steel razors are muted and frayed under time’s persistent grind, objects of strength peppered with the omnipotence of rain, of wind. Our illusions of permanence are skeletal. Crumbling ghosts in an obedient return to earth. People, objects, things rot on the periphery. Take comfort in the crowd. Backward glances leave us unnerved by a sinister image, grey carcasses seeping with orange reds. Tattered forms, broken, fragile, finished. There is an eerie resemblance, a premonition perhaps. Nature is adamant, an absolute presence, a confirmation that we are merely passing through. We are a small movement, temporary occupants. How insignificant are our industries, our wars, our structured societies, our manufactured supremacy. The body electric fails and falls. Rust is our mutability. Rust is our diminution. Our dominion. The natural translation of colour. The evolution of the elements.
Abridged, the poetry/art magazine is looking for submissions for its Rust issue. A maximum of 3 poems may be submitted of any length. Art can be up to A4 size and can be in any media. It should be at least 300 dpi. Submissions can be emailed to abridged@ymail.com or posted to: Abridged c/o The Verbal Arts Centre, Stable Lane and Mall Wall, Bishop Street Within, Derry BT48 6PU. Deadline for submissions is 21st April 2012.
…there’s a voice in the distance quiet and clear saying something that I never ever wanted to hear….
Abridged is supported by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland
March 17th 2012
Abridged 0 – 20 Abandoned Clare with Deirdre O’Mahony opening in Limerick City Arts Gallery as part of the Tense exhibition. Abridged 0 – 31: Crash. Postcards from over the Edge. June 2012. More News Soon.
April 01st 2012
Abridged 0 – 25: Silence is now available from Galway Arts Centre if you’re in that direction. Here’s a couple of photos from Abridged 0 – 20: Abandoned Clare in Limerick:
For any of you on the European mainland one of our favourite bands, And Also the Trees and contributor Simon Jones are touring. Well worth seeing.
The Abridged 0 – 26: Rust Submission Call is still open and we’ll have news of Abridged 0 – 31: Crash in the very near future. We’ll have more announcements very soon.
May 18th 2012
We’re in the midst of Abridged 0 – 26: Rust and will let everyone know the whys and wherefores very soon. 0 – 31: Crash will also appear in the not too distance. Watch this space and the facebook page for details. Abridging Galway: we’re delighted to announce that our Project Coordinator/Editor is the curator for the 2012 Tulca visual arts festival (www.tulca.ie) in Galway. We hope to see you there in November. Other projects are in the pipeline. We’ll keep you informed. This page is best viewed with anything other than Chrome.
