Walking piece details
| Duration | 90 minutes |
| Cost | Free to download but subject to an entry fee to get access to the Killruddery estate |
The Ancestors explores a hauntology of the Killruddery House & Gardens archives, using records belonging to the Brabazon family as source material to produce a complex sound collage of re-enactment, musical ambience, and field recordings 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 as part of a practice-based PhD at SMARTlab UCD, supported by the Irish Research Council. 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 the 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 inscription, and that through technological intervention, these spectres can be replayed as if they were archive recordings.
The Ancestors is hosted on Echoes.xyz.
