Making Dust

Making Dust is a film that looks closely at a rupture, the demolition of a church in Dublin through a portrait of the building’s dismantling.

The film documents the demolition of the Church of the Annunciation in Finglas in 2021, the second-largest Catholic Church in Ireland when it was built in 1967. While the cultural meaning of the end of this building has been marked by its community through ritual events, this project came from a new materialist perspective, drawing attention to the life of the fabric of the church. Produced in collaboration with architectural historian Ellen Rowley, and featuring oral interviews recorded in Finglas, the film points to questions of sustainability in architecture such as counting the embodied energy of this church. Tracing how materials were financed, grown and crafted, the project provides scope for audiences to reflect on the life of the building itself, socially, culturally, and environmentally.

The letterforms of the film's titles were drawn from the tracery of the stained glass windows in the church – the lines creep in and slowly retreat, mimicking the creation and destruction of the church; something coming from nothing, and then disappearing again.