TAPE 01
Fig1. Broadhaven Bay Decay, MadamK (2009)
Filmed from the ancient Bronze Age Dooncarton Stone Circle, and co-authored by the sea, this unedited footage captures Shell dredging vessels operating in Broadhaven Bay during the Corrib gas controversy and the laments and beautiful persistance of the community. The physical tape, exposed to sea mist and salt in 2009 in pursuit of the world’s largest pipe-laying vessel, underwent chemical decay that now functions as a metaphysical prophecy of environmental degradation, leaving an apocalyptic red-and-black warning of the future we may now inhabit while the deterioration causes a droning,humming, mechanical sound, intermittently broken up by the enduring sound of the fiddle playing out over the waves.
Seeing myself as a child emerge from the pixels at 7.24 feels like a hauntology device.
The chemical reaction on the film reflects a physical manifestation of landscape memory. As the emulsion breaks down, it creates a new visual language that speaks to the fragility of both the medium and the ecosystem it documents. This decay is not a loss of data, but a transformation of history into a sensory experience of preservation and of change.
Transnational Currents
….The blackened sky and darkened waters that we see in the film are not unique to this bay nor are they simply symbolic. They are the literal signatures of a global corporate violence also seen across Ogoni skies of Nigeria, where Shell began commercial oil operations in 1958, turning fertile mangroves into a sacrifice zone of toxic flares and ruptured pipelines. As the poet, activist, and writer Ken Saro-Wiwa observed of his home: “Streams polluted weeping / Filth into murky rivers”.
Beneath those burning skies, in the 1990s the Ogoni people sparked a historic, non-violent resistance movement against this ecological warfare. Saro-Wiwa weaponized the written word just as the women of the LFMC weaponized the frame, pulling marginalized suffering into the light from 'below'. For demanding sovereignty, he and eight of his compatriots, the Ogoni Nine, were executed by a corporate-complicit military state in 1995.
I place the salt-eroded footage of Broadhaven Bay in direct conversation with Ogoniland, as this journal refuses to view resistance in isolation
“Dance your anger and your joys
Dance the military guns to silence
Dance oppression and injustice to death
Dance my people
For we have seen tomorrow
And there is an Ogoni star in the sky”
~Ken Saro-Wiwa
This poem by Ken Saro-Wiwa was one of twenty seven poems and twenty eight letters smuggled out of Port Harcourt prison, where Saro-Wiwa and the other Ogoni Nine members were held for defying Shell’s ecocide. Sister Majella McCarron, the Irish nun from Fermanagh, had weaponised the assumptions of her innocence and between 1993 to 1995 she spirited away the last writings of her comrade Saro-Wiwa. Tucked beneath breadbaskets, the rescued writings stayed in her care for 16 years before being published in 2011 under the title ‘’Silence Would Be Treason’’. Sister Majella returned to Ireland and was a prominent part of the Shell to Sea resistance on the front-lines in Mayo.
The smuggled letters and my mother's tapes belong to the same circular, eternal shield of resistance. They collapse the distance between Port Harcourt and Broadhaven Bay, proving that when memory is anchored in radical kinship and mutual aid, it can never be buried in a corporate grave.
The Alchemical Film Journal Log
EPILOGUE
The living tape
To touch an old archive is to step into a landscape of shadows, ghosts, and half-silent voices. For years, I held memories of these moments and my mothers documenting of them, but I never questioned where these tapes were now hidden. This project forced me to re-discover and digitise them, to run their magnetic tape through an electronic reader, and to pull their images back into the light. The moment those pixelated lines unspooled across my digital workspace, the boundaries between past and present entirely dissolved.
The future of this archive does not belong to the quiet custody of the museum, nor the cold efficiency of the cloud. Our future is an act of alchemical reactivation, a commitment to keeping the friction of these images and stories alive.
To look forward is to recognize that the magnetic tape unspooled from my mother’s archives and the radical cell structures of the LFMC women, are not static ghosts. They are raw energy waiting to be re-ignited. The potential of this future archive lies in its transformation into a decentralized landscape of subversion. We need to create an infrastructure that does not just hold memory, but breathes it back into the world from below.
The Living Trajectory : A Sovereign Horizon
By claiming total digital sovereignty, the next phase of this project will decouple our histories from corporate gatekeepers, translating our treasury into community-owned, self-hosted servers and physical, offline nodes. I will work to expand this Journal into a collective workshop of tactical alchemy, where communities can gather to process and share film, write their own poetic metadata, and harness their own local realities against a flattening, capitalist amnesia.
We preserve not to look back, but to ensure that those who risk everything on the ground have a sovereign soil upon which their truths can permanently stand.
Continuing this journey, I will seek to revisit the specific people, communities, and eco-defense stories captured within my mother’s tapes, tracing where those struggles stand today and returning these digitized memories to the places they were born.
REACTIVATION
Reconnecting with the local activists, community members and resistance captured on these tapes while also broadening the research scope of this journal, linking the resistance of my community directly with global struggles like those of the Ogoni people.
SOVEREIGNTY
Creating a self-hosted, independent server infrastructure, ensuring our counter-histories are permanently protected and sharing our open-source archiving tools and sovereign metadata templates as a free resource for international groups, helping frontline communities build their own digital shields against corporate erasure.
Ethical Considerations : Embracing Slowness
Although I have now unearthed countless of my Mother's tapes which demand further exploration, this ongoing archive is rooted in a duty of care, not a rush for visibility.
By embracing technical slowness, the archive creates an ethical safeguard, a space for deep reflection that ensures those risking everything on the ground are protected and represented with dignity. To honour these struggles, we must claim total digital sovereignty over our history. Relying on corporate Silicon Valley infrastructure leaves community narratives vulnerable to algorithmic censorship and erasure.
As this project has illuminated, the true frontier of experimental film and media resistance is no longer just about who holds the camera, it is about who owns the infrastructure. To protect our people and preserve our truths, we must bypass corporate gatekeepers and independently host our own media, archives, and places for storytelling.
Mission Statement: The Unspooled Future
We do not gather these shadows to bury them in an institutional vault, nor to surrender their light to the corporate algorithms of Silicon Valley. The future of this archive is a living circuit, an alchemical reactivation of histories written from the other side and from below. We claim total digital sovereignty over our collective memory.
This archive will exist wherever our servers are grounded, wherever our communities gather to claim their own narratives, and wherever the friction of memory resists the enforced amnesia of a capitalist world. We do not merely aim to preserve the past, we are ensuring that the voices, ghosts, and half-silent truths of our mothers and our movements remain uncontainable, unsubservient, and beautifully sovereign.
This is a history forged by us, held by us, owned by us and burning from the below - up.