The Lios is a new installation work by innovative Cork-based company half/angel. half/angel (Jools Gilson-Ellis and Richard Povall) have been making experimental work involving new technologies, poetic text, sound, video and performance since 1995.
Known for their work with contemporary dance theatre and motion-sensing technologies, The Lios transfers this knowledge to a gallery space, so that instead of dancers triggering sound / text scores, visitors to the installation trigger voices by their movement and interaction with the work itself.
The Lios is thematically focused on the lios at Warren Beach, near Ballymacoda in East Cork, and the surrounding area. Through a combination of audio walks, and interviews with young and elderly local residents, the work builds up layers of memory and time. The Lios evokes one version of the emotional geography of place by combining oral history with experimental motion-sensing / haptic interfaces in an immersive installation environment.
The Lios is imagined as a poetic mapping of this site, into which visitors enter singly or in couples. As they move in and touch the space, they raise whispers and laughter and cacophonies of voice ghosts. In one space they must remove their shoes, to tread barefoot, and conjure voices out of water with their hands. In another space, emptiness gives way to light and narrative, as the visitor moves in the intelligent environment.
At the bottom of the boreen, the path splits into two. One takes you down to the rocky beach, the other lifts you up to the cliff edge. Here there is an old summer house, a shed really. Carla wonders about it. She can see that someone loved it once. But the wind and vandals have torn some of the shutters away from the windows. And there is a hole in the roof. On the sea side, if you stand on the old shutters, and shade your eyes from the light, you can see in. Here, curtains blow in the breeze, beyond them, a table and chairs, a rug, a sink and a dresser with china on it. And a closed door. What happened here? Here on the edge of the cliff, where no one comes.
Jools Gilson-Ellis 2003