Multi-Story

Multi-Story is a Create commission with artists Fiona Whelan and Feidlim Cannon alongside Housing Action Now (HAN) that sets out to engage housing activists in a unique online collaborative arts process, which explores their direct experience of the housing crisis through visual and performative story-telling.  

Housing Action Now is a collective of community workers, researchers, activists and artists concerned with the growing housing crisis in Ireland. HAN works with representatives from renters unions, those working with asylum seekers, refugees, disabled people, Traveller organisations, housing and homelessness and those in the student accommodation housing sectors.

Initially developed as a series of online workshops with HAN members and hosted by the artists, this workshop process has explored each activist’s own individual sense of home through multiple creative tasks which have evolved into text-based and theatrical elements. The project explores the potential of digital media to enhance socially engaged collaborative art-making, connecting diverse groups of housing activists in Ireland at this time.

Diverse perspectives have been documented, collated, and shared. Multi-Story is commissioned by Create, with support by the Arts Council’s Commissions Award 2020. The commission, Multi-Story: Act 1, culminated in a short performance that brought together diverse experiences of Ireland’s housing crisis as one compelling narrative, The Apology. The Apology publicly acknowledges the failures of the Irish State with regards to housing policy and provision in this country. Please watch and share The Apology by following this link.

On the 2nd of March 2022, The Apology was read in Seanad Eireann by Senators Lynn Ruane and Eileen Ní Fhloinn as part of a Seanad Private Members Motion on Housing brought by Senators Ruane, Ní Fhloinn, Higgins and Black.