Credit Photos by Niamh Barry

Digging up Nothing in Kiltalown transforms a black Dacia Estate into a site of recovery, witness, and transformation within Tallaght’s urban landscape. The work emerges from months of collaboration with the local recovery community, resulting in a film that documents their journeys from addiction’s abyss to tentative renewal.

The car becomes both confessional booth and theater stage. Audience members are drawn into the vehicle’s intimacy in five-minute intervals, occupying the five seats in the back while the artist performs around the exterior. Dressed in red high heels, tight fuchsia jeans, and pastel pink hoodie, Fabyc’s presentation suggests the precarious visibility of street sex work – another form of survival at society’s margins.

The performance orbits around a moment of devastating recognition: the inability to recognize oneself in the mirror, confronting eyes “dead and full of pain.” This confrontation with the unrecognizable self becomes the fulcrum between destruction and possibility – between overdose, institutionalization, imprisonment, or the difficult path toward recovery.

Through the film and live performance, voices from Tallaght’s recovery community emerge as testimony to survival. Their stories map the geography between despair and hope, revealing how community becomes the infrastructure for rebuilding identity. The work refuses to romanticize recovery, acknowledging instead its daily negotiation with existence’s tides, the ongoing need for support, and the small surrenders (coffee remains) that mark human frailty.

The title’s paradox – digging up nothing – suggests both the futility of searching for easy answers in addiction and the profound emptiness that must be faced before healing can begin. Within the confined space of the car and the specificity of Kiltalown, intimate transformation meets public witness.

Credit Photos by Niamh Barry