Duffy, J., 2024.

Cillini

Cillini is a 7 minute single channel experimental drone documentary. The Cillini spreads across rural Ireland, dotted along margins, the corner of fields and the interiors of circular fairy forts, each of its rocks a marker, each stone a grave. Iron age circles as liminal spaces, betwixt and between worlds embedded with mythology and folklore, fairy tradition, taboo and curses. The Cillini take up root as traumatic sites of oppressive religious practices, they are the sites of unconsecrated burials, of suicides, of unchurched mothers who died in childbirth but mainly of unbaptised infants.

Due to the concept of Original Sin in Catholic doctrine as construed by Augustine of Hippo unbaptised children were banned from consecrated ground. They were assigned to wander limbo in perpetual purgatory, taken from their mothers at the dead of night and hidden from sight. The fairy fort offered a ring of protection, of curses to keep out intruders and destructive farming practices and the potential for a different afterlife to keep these children safe.

Within this paper my current film and visual material with Cillini as subject matter will be discussed. These harrowing spaces are explored using drones to create an emotive sense of place, an eerie encounter between worlds, the contemporary and the ancient, the world of the living and the world of limbo, of fairy lore and tragedy in a landscape embedded with sorrow.

Whilst these sites refer to exclusion, trauma and of being forgotten my work Is to aid in the remembrance of these sites, to evoke a memory space and provide an opportunity for the stigma to be removed and communities to be able to grief and begin the process of healing.