On being there is a filmic encounter with the material and outputs of the office of Tom dePaor. The earliest project represented here is from 1991, and the film spans 30 years to include a project at Dysart, Co. Wicklow. There is the place itself. There are notebooks, drawings, prints, scale models, 35mm slides, photographs, films, files. A diversity of materials and media, evidencing significant technological changes in production and reproduction. Photographs, books, writing, and films are often made to parallel or complete each work. This is the raw material of the film. The film enacts an encounter with this material, exploiting the characteristics of its generation, storage and documentation. It is presented in 5 episodes or chapters which loosely correlate with ideas of the island, the vessel, the house, the hut and the fence. Projects are titled by address, and dated by completion.

As a filmmaker I am charged with curating this material for the screen. Many of the places I have visited, and some of them I have made in collaboration with dePaor. Some of the places I know only through the documentation. Most are still extant while others are destroyed. The film is a rerecording, or sampling of this material, where scale, media, and modes of presentation and realisation merge. The linear transition from drawing to model to built landscape and documentation is disrupted, superimposed upon itself. The film explores the permeability of the image. Animated or activated through movement and operation, everything can be superimposed, overlaid, or cut into. Nothing is fixed or permanent. Each segment is provisional, an attempt. An audio-visual encounter with place, within the space of the screen and the loudspeaker. Presented here is a skeuomorph of encounter. Scale models are fitted into drawings, drawings are fitted into photographs, moving images sit within static or moving images. A model is superimposed on a photograph of a building. Chronology is disrupted. Enfolded are previous Gall film works including Drape (2018), and Relayer (2008), and unseen material shot in 2000 by Ruán Magan of N3, the inaugural Irish Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Used here as source material, they are reversioned. In photographing, drawing, recording or documenting a place, a new work is made, originating from but not of that site. The observational photograph is just that, an observation recorded at a particular place and moment. The place itself is unaltered. Each image is charged by the understanding of the image-maker, and the ineliminable grain of the medium; a reading completed by the viewer.