Filmed on one of the most miserable sites of the industrial revolution in Manchester, referred to as Little Ireland. Today, we see a parking lot, an old factory of the times and new complexes of luxurious living still in development since the recent economic crisis slowed down gentrification. The film takes as its starting point Friedrich Engel’s biography, namely his relationship with Mary Burns, an illiterate and fierce Irish worker with radical opinions who showed him the darker parts of the city on which his influential book "The Condition of the Working Class in England" is based. For this video, I am riding in circles on a bike in exactly the spot where Little Ireland once was. While doing so another young woman is reading exactly the parts from Engels’s book that address Little Ireland.
Rainer Ganahl (USA/Austria) is a New York based artist showing internationally.
Format: HD
Running time: 15 minutes
