Blow-In

15. 06. – 24.06. 2005, CORK PUBLIC MUSEUM, IRELAND.

Blow-In is the culmination of Danger Museum’s experiences as outsiders or ‘blow-ins’ to Cork City, Ireland. The project consists of a booklet of interviews with practitioners in the art scene of Cork. They were conducted during the city’s year as European Capital of Culture, and presented with two computer manipulated collages at Cork’s civic museum.

The collages move the dialogues into a poetic visual language, incorporating architectural features, animal life and local peculiarities such as the fog from beer breweries, and point the attention towards more open questions about life in a small city. Cork is portrayed as a small town, where being a big fish can be both good and bad. It is a retreat for many big city get-aways, and sometimes a restraint for those with ambitions.
The interviewees themselves feature in these bleak, genre-style cityscapes of Cork, directing the question of the state of culture back at the community, yet on the background of a historical narrative.

Cork Public Museum is Cork’s official civic museum, located in Fitzgerald Park that were the grounds of the Cork International Exhibition of 1902/03.
The event would have outshone Cork 2005 many times over in terms of size and investment, yet today it has nearly disappeared from the city’s memory.
The museum’s collection displays the few relics of the Cork International Exhibition, amongst them a dried-up cigar which, according to the museum’s porter was given to the Lord Mayor of Cork, Fitzgerald, by King Edward VII at the luncheon held during the king’s visit.

Looking at the remains of Cork 1902/03, we returned to the question of what will be left after Cork 2005, and it therefore seemed natural to use the museum and its history as a context for our exhibition.
Finally, to commemorate the potential progress – or oblivion – of the year 2005 for Cork, we donated a cigar-shaped textile testimonial to the museum on the day of the opening.