The Buildings Are Listening is a new experimental documentary commissioned by the Arts Council of Ireland which examines Irish cultural buildings in moments of suspension, transition, and repose. Filmed across institutions including the Crawford Art Gallery and the Hugh Lane Gallery, alongside artist studios and independent cultural spaces temporarily closed to the public, the film imagines architecture not as passive infrastructure but as sentient witness. Removed from their usual cycles of production and spectatorship, these buildings are afforded a rare pause, spaces in which to dream, remember, and observe us in return.

Rather than centering the human subject, the work proposes the building itself as narrator and protagonist, it playfully constructs its narrative through an assemblage of overheard conversations, close listening, and collaged interviews. This polyphonic approach privileges association over exposition, allowing meaning to emerge gradually through the relationships between sound, image, and architectural space. The Buildings Are Listening asks, what if these buildings were just dreaming us?

The film, which will premiere at the Dublin International Film Festival in 2027, approaches cultural architecture as a living archive, absorbing traces of labour, ideology, expression, aspiration and collective memory long after their original functions have shifted or disappeared.

Influenced by contemporary approaches to architecture and material culture that understand interiors as ideological landscapes, the film will examine how national identity is constructed through spaces of culture and entertainment. It asks, what is preserved, what is erased, and who is authorised to act as custodian of collective memory? In post-independence Ireland, as cultural spaces are being lost or are increasingly shaped by tourism, capital, privatisation, and institutional redevelopment, the film seeks to interrogate who culture is for, who owns it, and who is expected to fund and sustain it?