New Publication. Echo’s Bones: A Parallel Play

A new publication brings the second fruits from a remarkable cultural project in the hugely Beckett-resonant area of Fingal in North Dublin.  Echo’s Bones is a public art project for Fingal County Council by artist Sarah Browne with autistic young people in the area. As Browne told the Beckett Circle in an interview: ‘I proposed creating a new film through this triangulation of Beckett, the contemporary experience of autistic young people, and Fingal as a place of origin and grounding for this enquiry, with a particular focus on the stories Beckett wrote in the 1930s. Some of the key professional collaborators I wanted to work with were identified in the application, but the actual substance of what the film would turn into could only be determined by the young people who would take part. It’s hard to track back now to where the impulse came from to draw together this combination of agents – Beckett, autistic young people and place’.

Explaining her impulse to collaborate with neurodiverse young people for the project, Browne noted that ‘in the years that followed More Pricks than Kicks, Beckett’s plays are populated with people who might be talking from dustbins or buried in a hill, moving with difficulty, recording themselves talking and then listening back, muttering over each other, gibbering into the dark or unspeaking altogether. These behaviours, should they be enacted by real people rather than fictional characters, would likely be scrutinised by a medical or psychiatric gaze. I was, and remain, curious about why some neurodivergent styles of language and communication may be rejected in everyday situations, but valued as artistically exciting or formally experimental in others.’

Autism in the Echo’s Bones project is not a deficit, a disorder, or a problem to be fixed. It is a condition of sensitivity and divergence from what’s socially and cinematically measured as ‘normal’. As a condition, it is a way of asking what a neurodivergent cinema, and art, and world could be like. Participants self-identified as autistic through opting into the process. The project was developed with Adam Greenan, Alex Kirwan, Andrew Darcy, Aoibhe Hoey, Ashwin Maliyakal, David Tansey, Eleanor McLoughlin, Eoin Hickey, Fionn Baker, George Weldon, L. Cronly, Noah Danson, Olivia Nic Lochlainn.

The resulting film Echo’s Bones premiered in 2022. The newly-published book is an amplified accompaniment to the movie as it not only reproduces the shooting script but also features original artwork, a collection of research material from the film production, and newly-commissioned fiction and non-fiction essays by award-winning writers Blindboyboatclub, Hamja Ahsan and Roy Claire Potter. The finished volume is a beautiful piece of design executed by Peter Maybury.

More information here.