Echo’s Bones (2022) is a collaborative film-making project with autistic young people in North Dublin, initiated in response to works by Samuel Beckett.
Development with the young people began with a series of online workshops between February – April 2021, facilitated by Sarah Fitzgibbon, Sarah Browne and Eleanor Walsh. These workshops included creative tasks in response to invited guests and artwork prompts, and discussions about autistic representation in film, TV and online. Together we watched films made by neurodiverse artists such as Mel Baggs’ In My Language (2007), Sharif Persaud’s The Mask (2019), and Jess Thom’s Me, My Mouth and I (2018).
The group are making a film together with Sarah Browne in 2022, informed by this process and an in-person devising and rehearsing process carried out with Mark Ball. Some of the earliest representations of autistic people are in medical films, which were often labelled as being ‘for educational audiences only’. This is a collective attempt at drafting the conditions of making and showing a film by neurodiverse people, for a neurodiverse audience.
