Jeremiah Day No Words for You, Springfield

Thursday 14 May 2015, 17hrs doors open 16hrs

– Note: this event if fully booked –

No Words For You, Springfield consists of a series of photo-works by Jeremiah Day and deals with the history of the Blasket Island storytellers, a group of storytellers and writers who flourished on a small island in Ireland, who then emigrated en masse to Springfield, an industrial city in the US, where the tradition of telling stories effectively died; a series of lithographs depicted this now decaying city. Day has been researching the movement of the people of the Blasket Islands off the Dingle Peninsula (Ireland), to the town of Springfield near Boston (USA) culminating in a complete evacuation of the Islands in the 1950s. What we know of the poetic tradition of the Blasket Islands comes to us largely through the efforts of the English linguist George Thompson. In the story-telling of the Blaskets, Thompson felt he had found a link with the pre-Socratic tradition of Greek epic poetry, where spiritual, personal, political and practical subjects were integrated. Therefore the boundary between art and life could be said not to exist at all. Over the last fifty years, Springfield has been largely in decline, a classic post-industrial American city. Can we imagine that any of the story-telling traditions of the Blaskets have lived on there? And though the Blaskets are long deserted, what remained within the now developed Ireland around them? What does progress mean, through the lens of the Blasket tradition? – Your registration via E: productie@castrumperegrini.nl  ensures your free entrance.

AMSTERDAM ART selected exclude / include. Alternate Histories for their walk “Layers of Past, Present and Future’ that takes you to four exhibitions that engage deeply with the layers of the past and propose new ways of looking into the future.

Visit GRIMM gallery and project spaces Castrum Peregrini, Rongwrong and Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam to discover how contemporary art wrestles with the increasing complexity of history and memory using both old and new media. The route is 5 km long and takes about 30 minutes to bike. Follow the route and read more here