Blinded by the very force it imagined it could handle

Single screen video installation with sound. 12 minutes looped

By Peter Mann and Donovan Wylie

Belfast Exposed Bank Gallery 2023

The act of demolition provides cathartic release, and reflection on the impossibility of how one tells the story of a conflict.  

In 2007 Donovan Wylie and film maker Peter Mann recorded the demolition of an internal perimeter wall of the Maze/Long Kesh Prison. Born in Belfast, 1971, Wylie’s work is rooted in the idea of art as an antidote to the nihilism that conflict can induce. The scene of the demolition was directed so that at different moments we feel oppressed by the wall and then protected by it and the almost overwhelming sounds as the wall is destroyed evoke Wylie’s childhood memories of sleep broken by the sounds of explosions in the city. Finally the destruction of the wall creates a space into which a sense of peace emerges.

The title of the film is a quote from Simone Weil’s essay ‘The Iliad, or the poem of force’, the most unflinching analysis of the telling of the story of war, without taking sides and without ever being seduced by it.