As a coastal city and a port, Dublin is intrinsically linked to water. Its first biodiversity artist-in-residence, Rosie O’Reilly, is on a mission to ensure that the capital’s hydro-story doesn’t fade into the abyss.
“Water has been written out of the history of the city, even though it’s the origin of it and the reason the city grew,” O’Reilly says.
During her six-month Dublin City Council (DCC) residency last year, she familiarised herself with the intricacies of the capital’s waterways, learning their every twist and turn. The result of this was an all-consuming project, Abhainn, which is an 11km walking trail through the city centre that anyone with a smartphone can access using the Dublin Discovery Trails app.
As the project’s name suggests – Abhainn is Irish for river – this immersive trail combines music and storytelling to create a love letter to Dublin’s rivers.
The full route takes about two hours and 40 minutes; O’Reilly is taking me along part of it. Opting for an analogue version of guide – she’s strapped into headphones and a cassette player – the artist leads our expedition through the city.
O’Reilly grew up in the coastal suburb of Sandymount, and much of her work as a multidisciplinary artist explores the concepts of climate change and biodiversity loss through a hydro lens. Between listening to snippets of the trail’s seven distinct episodes, she explains how the project unfolded.
“One of the places I went to first was the city archive on Pearse Street. I asked for any archive material they had on water and was really surprised with how little I got,” she says.
So O’Reilly put a public call-out in local newspapers for stories about water, which she hopes to preserve.
“It’s interesting to look at the archive as a political space and how to repopulate it with stories that are really relevant to the city.” In the past, she says, “there was no value in recording them”.
“There’s no value in recording nature stories when you’ve a model that’s based around growth at all costs. So this is a way to reshape that and flatten hierarchies,” O’Reilly says.
Sound is an integral aspect of O’Reilly’s creative practice, and a tool she uses to enhance this project. She worked closely with her partner, Colm Ó Cíosóig, the My Bloody Valentine drummer, on Abhainn’s musical direction.
“We’ve ended up, through different projects over the last 10 years, collaborating,” she says. During her DCC residency she was “walking the city all the time, and writing and responding and thinking”.
“Then, when I prepared the text, I asked him to improvise on piano. So when I had written a story he would have to respond to that,” O’Reilly says.
Music works as a storytelling device in the walking trail. “I think it’s so important in a city to be immersed in things, increasingly with digital technology and everything. And sound means you have to stop,” O’Reilly says.
“It’s a story being told and it’s also a song being written and it’s also a walk being done. The three together allow it to be an immersive sensory experience.
“Initially I had no idea how I was going to end up telling the story of the rivers, and it was very different as I worked through it. But as I started meeting people and hearing stories and researching ... I just felt so moved by the history of the city through water.”
Everything about this city when you read it through Gaeilge starts telling you about the place. Irish understands this country and every inch of it
An episode of the trail entitled Thinking with Salmon follows the Bradogue river from the perspective of the fish from which it gets its name. It unravels one of the project’s common threads: the relationship between place and language.
“I was really interested in the story of salmon and trout. There’s only one or two cities in Europe that have returning salmon and trout, and the salmon is so symbolic in Irish mythology that it was impossible to tell the story without thinking through salmon,” says O’Reilly, who collaborated with the ecologist Ken Whelan on this aspect of her research.
“What the project really taught me was, in Gaeilge and in our indigenous tongue, our relationship to nature is so profound, and our understanding of intelligence, for example, in the human world is all written into our language. Thinking with Salmon unpicks so much about how we have to rethink our relationship to the city, our relationship to water, our relationship to those kin.
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“My partner’s first language is Gaeilge. He grew up speaking it in Dublin. I use it in my work a lot, but I’m not fluent. I’m aiming to be: we speak it at home a lot,” she says. “Everything about this city when you read it through Gaeilge starts telling you about the place. Irish understands this country and every inch of it, in every detail, in ways that Béarla [English] won’t.”
Chief among the city’s hidden rivers is the Poddle, which runs underground for most of its course. As well as being central to the Dublin’s growth, as a primary water source, it is thought to be the origin of its English name: the Poddle helped to form the Black Pool, or Dubh Linn, roughly where Dublin Castle’s garden now sits; its waters then emerge into the Liffey through a grille at Wellington Quay.
O’Reilly’s first studio was based in a building on Mill Street, where the Poddle makes a fleeting appearance. This features as one of Abhainn’s seven episodes.
“Now it’s all hotels and student accommodation, but then at the back of the student accommodation they’ve left a section of the river. They obviously weren’t allowed to build over it ... In the planning application it stipulates that it has to be left for the public,” she says.
“This walk brings you there and then asks the question about how can this happen: how can we only leave one section of this mythical river – the most famous underground river of the city and the reason this city developed?”
O’Reilly is involved as an activist in “the legal movement to build the rights of nature into the Constitution”. The success of such a campaign would “radically shift things”, she says, “because then the legal basis will be there for city councils to not, for example, culvert rivers – to let them flow.”
For O’Reilly, whose life’s work revolves around issues of climate and environmental deterioration, how does this affect her mindset?
“I’m not saying I’m infinitely hopeful – it’s obviously a devastating time ecologically – but I think I’m in the right area to at least know that I have the capability for shape-shifting through whatever’s ahead,” she says.
“I think culture and arts are so critical right now, because they’re nonbinary spaces that are challenging hierarchy and challenging thinking. That’s why this residency ended up in the city council: they’ve never had it before. When you embed artists who are critical thinkers into places, they will automatically challenge the thinking that’s within them.”
O’Reilly has lived on a houseboat with her family at Grand Canal Dock marina – “immersed in this blue space in the centre of the city” – for the past 12 years.
“We brought a barge in from France and renovated it ... There’s just a sense of it being a step for me in the right direction of where we need to go around the inequalities that we’re witnessing in cities.”
Being close to nature was one driving factor for O’Reilly in deciding to opt for houseboat living, as was the ability to scale down. “We’ve done audits on the boat, but just by virtue of being in a small space you’re using a third less carbon and a third less water than you would in an average household.”
She describes the marina’s small “intergenerational and interclass” community as very supportive. “There’s this kind of unwritten rule with a marina where everyone has to help each other because you’re mooring boats ... everyone has to jump out and grab a rope.”
When she wants to escape the city, O’Reilly finds solace in planting trees. “We bought this land out in Waterford that we’re replanting some trees on ... At the moment we’re planting 500 trees that we got from the charity Trees on the Land. We’re trying to create a small coastal forest in an agricultural area. So everyone thinks we’re mental. It’s our salvation.”
Abhainn is free to download through the Dublin Discovery Trails app, and an analogue version with episodes on cassette can also be accessed. The project was curated by Ruth Carroll and funded by Creative Ireland through the Creative Climate Action Fund and Dublin City Council
