Doireann O’Malley’s work merges cinematic imagery, ethnographic film, and community engagement across West Cork, Glenkeen, and Clare Island to create a complex reflection on contemporary rural Ireland. The multipart film intertwines real and speculative conversations with various actors — animals, activists, poets, farmers, and members of the O’Malley clan, including O’Malley’s younger self, their grandmother, and ancestor, Grainne Mhaol ‘The Pirate Queen’. Captured through drone shots and cinematic observations, the Irish landscape acts as a portal to past, present, and future experiences, revealing repressed or lost histories.

A biographical and biopolitical layer addresses the complexities of ‘coming home’ and the feeling of not being ‘at home’ in one’s body, family, or country. O’Malley critiques the simplification of trans* identity and the Western separation of body and self, suggesting that true belonging involves exploring fluid, socially influenced gender identities.

Doireann O’Malley lives and works in Berlin and nomadically in Ireland. Primarily experimenting with moving images, film, digital and analogue, CGI, 3D, and VR as tools to explore the conditions of embodiment. Exploring the complex relationship to time, gender, healing, community, and nonhuman kinship. Stylistically their work could be characterised by the term ‘ancestral futurism’, where the technological tools for conjuring these interdependent relationships between past, present, and future are used as shamanic mediums.

Elisa T. Bertuzzo is an urban ethnographer and theorist. Bridging discourses of the environmental humanities, visual anthropology, migration studies, and postcolonial studies, and committed to the feminist project of validating practices of care, community economies, as well as epistemologies oppressed by colonial, extractivist, and patriarchal logics, her work applies anthropological and sociological methods, including mapping, to investigating the everyday life facets of solidarity, resistance, and self-organisation, especially in cities in Asia and Europe.

(As of 2024)