Firkin Crane exhibition inviting the public to imagine a better Cork City

A new exhibition invites Cork people to imagine a better city, one where everyone has a home, a place to play and create, and access to just, meaningful work.

Dance Cork Firkin Crane is set to host a residency by Jude Sherry and Frank O’Connor, who run Derelict Cork, highlighting vacancy and dereliction in Cork, and Anois, a design consultancy firm concerned with social justice and sustainability.

The residency, which has its opening night on Thursday night and will run until May 31, will feature a number of events, starting with an exhibition.

Conversation

Mr O’Connor told The Echo he and Ms Sherry decided to run the residency because they believed it was time to have a conversation about Cork city and its future.

“We have designed the residency very much around creating a conversation about, from everything from dereliction and vacancy to housing, heritage, culture, community,” he said.

“It’s very much about what do we want our city to be, and where do we want our city to go, but putting the people of the city at the centre, the community, so that cities are for people, primarily, that we put the city back in the hands of the people.”

The residency opens on Thursday with a mixed-media exhibition focusing on topics such as dereliction, housing and heritage, as well as looking at how people live and work in cities.

“It’s covering those key topics through a mix of media, photography, sculpture, different types of fabric and materials, we’ve got a lot of interesting works that we want to display that will hopefully get people thinking about these issues,” Mr O’Connor said.

“We are taking the approach that the gallery is for everyone, so rather than just be about the work that we’ve done, at the centre of the exhibition we’re creating a very strong conversation space so the people who come along to the event can really interact with what we are talking about and give their opinions as well.”

Excited

Mr O’Connor said he and Ms Sherry, who are funding the exhibition themselves while Dance Cork Firkin Crane hosts them for free, were very excited to see where the exhibition would go and what conversations and changes it might spark.

“We love the city and we want a much better city that works for everyone.

“We don’t want to see people on the streets struggling without a house, we don’t want to see derelict and decaying heritage everywhere, we want to see communities building,” he said.

“We’re delighted to be hosting this at what we consider the centre of the city, the Firkin, in Shandon, by the Butter Exchange, where key conversations have been had in the past, and this is the space to come to, to have this conversation.”

The opening night runs in Dance Firkin Crane from 6pm to 8pm and admission is free.