Day 1 Saturday May 23rd 2009 Arrival at Curfew Tower, Cushendall, Northern Ireland.

by Conor Kelly, 27 May 2009

My residency is taking place over a brief and presumably intensive three-week period at the Curfew Tower (formerly Turnly’s Tower) in the village of Cushendall, County Antrim. It is a red sandstone folly commissioned by landlord Francis Turnly in the 1820s as ‘a place of confinement for idlers and rioters’. Today it is owned by Bill Drummond (of KLF and K Foundation fame) and artists’ residencies are facilitated by Void Gallery in Derry. The village was known well to one Roger Casement (1864-1916) and it seems an appropriate place to contemplate and frame a relationship with certain histories and the notion of memory. The memory of Casement has long been a divisive one and although the question of his memorialisation has rattled on intermittently and publicly for what is fast approaching a century, there appears a kind of absence in that regard, here, in a place to which he was so intrinsically linked.

The introduction of this blog begs the question not only of how and why, as a society, we should wish to memorialise but who is it we wish to memorialise? Who was Roger Casement? Which Casement shall we recall? Is it fitting to memorialise Casement’s achievements?
And should we?