RHL Walking Tour + NAMACO Video Game Screening

This event begins with a walking tour of buildings acquisitioned by the Revolutionary Housing League and ends with a playthrough of NAMACO's video game Grand Canal Demolition Derby in the Thomas House Bar.

Meeting Point: Outside Nancy Hands (Bar and Restaurant) on Parkgate Street, D08 W6X3

Event Duration: 2 Hours

The Revolutionary Housing League (RHL):
The RHL is an Irish socialist Republican organisation founded in 2022 with the aim of combatting the housing crisis through the seizing of vacant or derelict properties. The RHL views the legitimacy of its direct action approach as stemming from the proclamation of the Irish Republic in 1916 and stemming from this, numerous buildings in Dublin have been renamed after Irish revolutionary martyrs and flipped from their market commodity status into progressive spaces which house the homeless and refugees, stage educational talks about Irish history and culture and hold a variety of events such as fitness workshops and food outreach programs. Tour guide Evan Kelly is an artist from Limerick who has worked with the RHL through his work with Rupture Cinema, a project which stages guerilla film screenings in liberated territories in the city. His work looks at environments – urban, natural and social – and charts how collective life enacts changes on these terrains, and is in turn changed by them. To this end, he has been involved in numerous talks and walking tours about radical approaches to city life.

NAMACO's New Game:
Grand Canal Demolition Derby is a PS1-style game set between the arena of Dublin’s Grand Canal Dock and Saol Eile, a spectral otherworld. Players learn about the historic basis to the Free State's over-reliance on US: From centuries of colonial limitations imposed by Britain, to the substitution of indigenous industry with US investment from the 1950s onwards and the buyout of Irish housing by investment funds from 2008. The game’s ‘missions’ - to thrash the Teslas, smash the servers and maim the mainframes of American tech companies - serve as a metaphor for the shift from US tech dominance to a socialised economy, where industries and housing are publicly owned and the beneficiaries are ordinary people, not billionaires. GCDD was created by NAMACO, headed by Donal Fullam and Han Hogan, in collaboration with 3D artist Peter Jessiman. It brings together the music of Rising Damp, the Deadlians, One Leg One Eye and Rats Blood, with the voices of Elaina Murphy Cerrone, Ro Barret and James Wilson.