American Wake: Filleadh
A tri-site multimedia installation centered on the Irish diaspora and labor organizing in the West, opening simultaneously in Ireland, Wyoming, and Montana — asking what it means to bring a life home across an ocean and a century.
This is our site partner in Beara Peninsula, Ireland. Allihies Copper Museum.
A wake held in three places at once
An American wake was the gathering Irish emigrants' families held the night before departure — a wake for the living, since the distance and cost of the journey meant most would never be seen again. Filleadh, Irish for "return," answers that grief across a century by bringing the story home in three places simultaneously: Allihies in County Cork, Butte in Montana, and Laramie in Wyoming.
At the center of the installation is Bridget Shea, an Irish emigrant labor organizer whose life threads together the mining and rail towns of the American West with the community she left behind. The piece moves between archival material, descendant testimony, and new multimedia work built specifically for each of the three sites.
Filleadh is not a single object that travels — it is one story, told from three places at once, asking the same question of each: what does it mean to finally come home, across an ocean and a century?