Visual Arts Programme
The Concourse Installation 2001
Desk Space - Amanda Dunsmore
Amanda Dunsmore studied and recorded the hidden office spaces of the Council building for her installation Desk Space. The piece was comprised from the detail and minutiae of the building but it raised issues that are relevant throughout the Western World - namely contemporary office culture, our personalisation of our environment and how a sense of individuality can be created in the most unlikely places.
Dunsmore collected through digital photography and sound recordings a series of portraits of the 'desk spaces' of the 1000 or so employees of the council. These images were then placed onto a digital track and projected in the Concourse space within specially constructed viewing towers that allowed one visitor at a time to view the sequence of images.
As in Bedding Out, the process of making was central to Desk Space. The artist worked with the full co-operation of the council staff and spent time describing and discussing the work with the 
employees, a process that took longer than the actual taking of the images themselves and one that was just as important to the final success of the work. The resulting digital stills video installation created an opportunity for visitors to the council building to pause and reflect on their way to their official business, and similarly the time that Dunsmore spent with the employees introduced into the working day space for debate and discussion around issues of how we shape our environment and why we need to demarcate our territory.
No information was given to support the images to tell us who worked at the different desks shown and what was their role and position with in the hierarchy of the council. The result was that we were able to create our own narratives, finding humorous connections between the strange array of objects shown - from toys and postcards to family pictures and imagine the significance of events held behind each object. Much of the ephemera photographed referred to a world beyond the office, giving fragmentary glimpses of the lives of these unseen people, but not completing the story. In contrast, some desks showed an apparent lack of individual detail with no personal objects brought in, however manipulation of the mundane resources around, blue tack, paper clips, post-its demonstrated the same desire to make a mark. Through the documentation of these small trivial details Desk Space creates a form of census of a moment in time at the council and the people working there - Desk Space is about the people of the council, not the council itself.
While the most site-specific in its character of all the three installations, Desk Space has a resonance and wider significance beyond Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Council offices. For a visitor to the building the initial interest was a voyeuristic thrill at the revelation of the normally hidden offices - breaking down the normal barriers between the public and private spaces of the building. The humour and individuality that came through the images served to show the human side of what can perceived as a faceless bureaucracy.
After this initial engagement, the images raised a series of wider questions: how do we function within the structures of our working lives? Is it still possible to retain a sense of individuality within the corporate world? What drives us to mark out our territory, making it uniquely ours? The careful decorations of some desks recall a suburban desire to decorate houses with the most unusual Christmas lights, to have a front garden more distinctive than the next. Whatever the scale, difference has long been a method with which to define ourselves. However, the familiarity of much of the ephemera collected by the Dun Laoghaire Rathdown workforce calls into question our ability to find individuality in an increasingly globalised, commercial society. How different would the piece have been if it had been made in London, New York or Paris?
The installation was open to the public during the aftermath of the twin towers. Many of the buildings staff and visitors viewing the work saw a new signif
icance in this exploration of individuality, particularly within the office environment. In the obituaries of the victims of the Twin Towers run by the New York Times, nameless cogs in the corporate world became individual personalities through the recollection of small, often mundane details of the victim's lives -a man who coached his child's baseball team, another who had just returned from a trip of a lifetime. It gave us another view of the World Trade Centre as a collection of individuals, rather than the more usual one of a huge corporate machine full of nameless workers.
As already mentioned, all the artists responded initially to the scale of the concourse space. A grand, public space that by its nature imbues objects placed within it with a certain significance. On entering the space the visitor was confronted with two large, sculptural viewing 'structures', each reminiscent of a tower. The artist has stated that these 'stacked a claim on the space' for the work, but their scale and physical relationship to the grand concourse space in no way prepared for the intimate portrayal of the small details of people working lives, not a subject normally hi-lighted in civic displays. This context brought these small details from the hidden to the celebrated, causing both the visitor and office staff to pause and consider something encountered in the everyday, but removed from its normal context in this way - shown to us to be rich in significance.
