Beep Plz
I arrive on my bike, with my usual rucksacked alibi of tripod, camera, and sound equipment. I set up and stand amongst them to film this small gathering. There isn’t much talking going on as the traffic noise is so loud, and movement is constant along the footpath in front of the building that has been occupied. The people gathered on the steps are preoccupied, so my vague efforts to assimilate go unnoticed. People at a protest are surprisingly indifferent to cameras – I am, after all, checking them out, not quite sure of their politics.>>> 

I cross the street to frame and film the demonstrators and the occupiers. A larger group has gathered now, but this segment of road with high volume of buses is inhospitable to people, and particularly to protest. Banners get blown out of the way, someone speaks through a megaphone… it’s hard to hear… 

At one point I walk away and start packing up, before rethinking: I haven’t captured anything worth having. Whatever their politics (and I can work this out later), this kind of action is worth recording. I make my way back up the street as occupiers on the top floor, each of whom is masked with an oversized cut-out face of then Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, try to attach a banner from the windows. The masks make their efforts comical as they battle the wind, trying hopelessly to weigh it down with water bottles. In the editing process I am alert to how easy it would be to ridicule this inherently comical action. The comedy is indeed partly at their expense but perhaps more so in seeing the recognisible face of an elected leader with fixed smile struggling to accomplish what becomes an absurd task. I’m drawn in by this yet I feel outside of this event – it is an initiative of others, and while my presence here offers tacit support, perhaps my more honest intention is that of gathering material. They have occupied a building owned by a property developer (this is slightly ambiguous for me as the basement is and has been for many years a rehearsal room for bands including mine – a sub-cultural mainstay) and this is something I am never likely to do.+ It feels dangerous. Perhaps this is an action for people without young families to care for? Perhaps I am too conservative or lack their courage. It makes me question how I think of myself. Filming this gives me vicarious participation, but no sense of belonging.

Fig. 80 Beep Plz.