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Our Demands Most Moderate Are
Fiadh trevaskis hoskin
Fiadh Trevaskis Hoskin is a poet and artist, she has a degree in Philosophy and English Lit from UCD and has been writing for most of her life. Her work has appeared in The Irish Times, Poetry Ireland, Flare, Impossible Archive and a number of other publications and zines. She generally works in short form revelatory poetry which attempts to encapsulate the generalisable message within specific moments. She has worked with the medium of photography for a number of years. Fiadh is the recipient of We Only Want the Earth 2021, Residency Award 2 in partnership with Fire Station Arists’ Studio, Community Action Tenants Union (CATU), and consulting artist Kerry Guinan.
"We Only Want the Earth" is Fiadh’s favourite poem by James Connolly. She has always loved the utopian sentiment of the titular line, but her interest here lies in the juxtaposition of the almost contradictory line which comes before it "Our demands most moderate are". The positioning of these lines has always struck her as simultaneously humorous and deeply profound.
OUR
DEMANDS
MOST
MODERATE
ARE
Is a reflection on her four years of squatting in Dublin. Her residency focuses on the contrast between the utopian prefigurative sentiment which underpins much anarchist squatting and the actually existing need and deprivation which she both experienced and witnessed under such living conditions. Over the four months Fiadh has been developing new poetry in response to photographs from this four-year period. Each poem explores the "really existing demands" which are lived on a day-to-day basis in our city. The poems variously do this through the lenses of housing, healthcare, heavy-handed policing, poverty and addiction. The work is an attempt to outline a personal and specific phenomenology of housing precarity in Dublin as a way of highlighting more general trends in the neo-liberal approach to housing currently being implemented at various levels of society"
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