The Ancestors is a hauntological soundtrail geo-located in the grounds of Killruddery, a historic house in County Wicklow, Ireland. The work explores the written archives of the Brabazon family who have been living at Killruddery since 1618.
‘The Ancestors’ explores a hauntology of the Killruddery House & Gardens archives, using records belonging to the Brabazon family as source material to produce an interactive and immersive sonic experience through re-enactment, field recordings and musical enchantment, accompanied by the voice of a ghostly poet-philosopher, “The Keeper of the Archives”.
Artist Joseph Young has been peripatetically in-residence at Killruddery since 2019 for a practice-based PhD at SMARTlab UCD, part of the Inclusive Design Research Centre of Ireland and supported by the Irish Research Council, through an Enterprise Partnership Award. During this time, he has collected hundreds of hours of binaural field recordings gleaned from soundwalking the estate, talking to the family, becoming intimate with the architecture, landscape and archives.
The resulting hauntological sound trail utilises geo-location inspired by so-called ‘Stone Tape Theory’ to summon the sonic revenants of the archive within the grounds of the estate. Stone Tape Theory asserts that the phenomena of ghosts can be understood as ancient “tape recordings” captured by old buildings through a form of sound writing or phonography, and that through technological intervention, these spectres can be replayed as if they were archive recordings.
The Ancestors is hosted on Echoes.xyz.