Mayor of South Dublin County Council, Cllr Paul Gogarty launches South Dublin EPIC – an online collaborative and interactive work, combining story and art, curated by Colm Keegan, with artwork by Bob Byrne. It is South Dublin County re-imagined and built from stories of the young writers of South Dublin. It is South Dublin as you’ve not seen it before.
South Dublin County Council Libraries & Arts commissioned writer Colm Keegan to develop and deliver a series of creative writing workshops with young people. Colm took the brief and delivered on it on a truly EPIC scale. Schools and youth organisations across the county were invited to participate in what Colm described as a ‘journey through speculative fiction’. *
In the way that speculative fiction takes inspiration from real events (such as hugely popular dystopian or fantasy stories such as World War Z and Game of Thrones), participants in the EPIC project were encouraged to look on South County Dublin, its history, its geography and their own experience in it, as source material from which whole new worlds could be built and as a means to explore their lives in a unique and liberating way.
“I asked the participants one very big question: What would you do – if you could do anything? By setting their stories in fictionalised versions of South Dublin County, the students were freed from the constraints of everyday life – from gravity to good manners – to answer this question in ways that will surprise you. The peoples of Clankland, The Authority, The Hinterland and After the Fall have much to say that will provoke thought and discussion,” Colm Keegan explains.
South Dublin EPIC – The Exhibition will be on view in the County Library and the website will be open for visitors from Thursday 24th May
*Speculative fiction is narrative fiction with supernatural or futuristic elements, encompassing science fiction, fantasy, superhero fiction, science fantasy, horror and supernatural fiction, as well as their combinations.
