A Haunting is a site-specific piece taking place in the People’s Park Limerick on the 29th of October, created by Gothicise in collaboration with Limerick City Council. The concept for the Halloween event in the People's Park follows the spectral theme of A Haunting; in this case, the haunting quality will come from the past of the Park itself - the day and night events will illustrate how the past can bleed into the present using methods of re-creation of Victorian events and customs germane to the original park, but translated into a modern idiom - while also emphasizing the grainy, misty quality of memory and the passage of time by using projections, film, sounds and especially the revolutionary new technique of photography from this era.
The timing of the event is no accident - it is scheduled to mark Hallowe'en, itself an echo of the old Celtic festival of Samhain, a festival of the dead, marking the beginning of a long winter. It was believed that this was the most liminal point of the year, a time when the living and the dead could walk side by side, hence the tradition of 'guising', or dressing as spirits and ghosts; thought by some folklorists to be an attempt to confuse the spirits of the returning dead. It was also a festival that revolved around ideas of divination, with the dissolution of boundaries between the living and the dead, this rendered communication possible. This fusion of past and present may seem paradoxical, but the Victorian era itself was an era of paradoxes; of public moral codes and secret licentiousness, of sentimentalism and of scientific discovery, of industrialism and nostalgia. This double-image is also referenced in the literature of the period; the sinister double can found found in key texts, such as Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Events will include a Costumed Promenade around the Park, commemerating the thin veil between past and present, a Victorian dance event, site-specific artwork, a history trail, Victorian-style photography and a Ghost Bus tour of Limerick's spectral history.
Chief collaborators; Tracy Fahey, Aoife Cox, Holly Burnard, Eibhlis Slevin, Catherine Geagan, Barry Masterson, Cliodhna Barry, Ciara Nolan, Aoife Tierney, Josie O'Connor and Lotte Bender together with Ciara Farrell of the Limerick City Council, Fiona Kiely of the Limerick Civic Trust, Hannah Fahey, singer, Martin Corcoran, composer and Pamela Dunne of the Limerick Printmakers.
Gothicise would like to acknowledge the kind support of the Limerick City Council, the Limerick Civic Trust, the Limerick Printmakers and the many others who have helped to put this work together.