In new exhibition, artist highlights gap between how co-living was advertised and how living there actually felt

A chilly wind blew through Temple Bar and Eva Richardson McCrea stood outside Project Arts Centre, smoking a cigarette.

The centre was all-go as the opening of her show, The Decameron / Na Deich Lá, was just two days away.

Newspaper covered a flatscreen mounted into the wall of an ad-hoc corridor leading into the exhibition space, where a woman was using a roller to coat the room in white paint.

On the back wall, a film was being projected, showing a mundane interaction between three roommates in a living room.

Two female characters were in the middle of a game of chess, while a guy lurked in the foreground, observing their moves, offering the occasional bit of commentary.

Richardson McCrea took a seat on the dusty floor to watch the awkwardly banal scene, which forms part of her re-imagining of The Decameron, a 14th-century epic novel by the Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio.

Boccaccio’s tome was composed of 100 stories shared by 10 characters during the Black Death, Richardson McCrea says.

But, whereas the Italian author’s “human comedy” took place in a remote villa outside Florence, Richardson McCrea’s loose adaptation occurred in a less plush setting: a co-living apartment.

Richardson McCrea’s drama depicts very casual interactions. But in a space that is oddly uneasy. Characters try to unwind on the sofa, by reading, but are distracted by two roommates sitting on either side of them, talking to each other loudly.

One character attempts to quietly eat a potato salad while someone else feels obliged to comment on how toxic their skins are to consume.

They are people who are forced into having these relationships with each other, she says. “Some of them are having a dialogue, but just talking at the other.”

It’s less like a living space than a waiting room or an Airbnb filled with magazines, generic art and board games.

Accommodation like this has this underlying tension, because the spaces are being monitored, she says. “Passive aggressive emails go out. You have to reserve a space in the fridge on an app. It’s highly bureaucratic living.”

Guerilla residency

Richardson McCrea couldn’t disclose where she and videographer Anthony O’Connor shot The Decameron / Na Deich Lá, because they filmed it in an actual co-living apartment.

She lived there for six weeks, shooting the entire 64-minute film unbeknownst to the management, she says. “It was two weeks of research, and then a month to shoot.”

Due to the nature of the shoot, they filmed exclusively on smartphones, which would raise fewer questions than a camera, she says. “When everything is on phones, it’s something people understand, so they find it less threatening.”

The early days of production were a bit tense, she says. “I didn’t know if management was going to come in, but by the end everybody knew I was doing something. Just nobody knew exactly what.”

Most of the scenes involve two or three characters, in order to draw less attention to their activities, she says. “We would just go into the communal living space on-the-fly and assume nobody would be there.”

Most of the time, nobody was there, she says. “Everybody was in their bedrooms.”

That alone undermined one of the core claims made by proponents of co-living, which is that it can provide a solution to generational loneliness and social atomisation, she says. But given that people rarely hung around the shared living spaces, “clearly, it wasn’t the case”, Richardson McCrea says.

They used a few locations throughout the premises, she said. “We would go to one of these five communal spaces, and each one was themed. There was a books room, a music room, a games room, what I call a telescope room, and a TV room.”

A few segue scenes were filmed in the corridors too. The visual style shifts between shaky, almost dizzying handheld cameras out in the hallway, and a more static style in the communal rooms, bearing some resemblance to the Big Brother-style of cinematography used in Jonathan Glazer’s 2023 The Zone of Interest.

Accompanying the main film, and outside in the temporary corridor, Richardson McCrea has mounted a flatscreen into the wall, showing black and white CCTV-like footage of her watching television and sleeping in her bedroom in the co-living flat.

“It is to kinda blur the lines between public and privacy there,” she says.

That sense of one’s personal space being invaded is also present in the exhibit’s main film. Characters struggle to enjoy a moment of quiet in different communal spaces, as others interrupt them.

Inversely, while they may share a room, they also seem to be completely disconnected from one another.

Richardson McCrea plays with a lot of contradictory ideas like this, as spaces intended to be lively in their decor, are utterly sterile, being populated by plastic plants, drab muted colours and cheap furniture designed to seem luxurious.

“There are also elements that feel Celtic Tiger-y, like in the quality of the builds,” Richardson McCrea says.

It’s a place where a lot of the small things can chip away at you, she says. “You’d have to use a key card to open every corridor. But there is a delay between when you put the key card on the thing, and pull open the door, so if you pull it open too soon it won’t open.”

“After a month of that, it was driving me insane,” she says. “Like the slow grating effects of the architecture and security.”

Promises and reality

Through The Decameron / Na Deich Lá, Richardson McCrea wanted to bridge the gap between how co-living was advertised, and how actually living there felt.

It was something that former Fine Gael Minister for Housing Eoghan Murphy, in July 2019, framed as a trendy solution to the housing crisis, Richardson McCrea says. “On paper, it was for a young affluent workforce, and a solution to the age of loneliness and atomisation.”

But, in reality, it was not that at all, she says. “When I stayed there, it had a massive overflow of people affected by the crisis. One of those demographics was men in their 50s who had gone through a divorce, and struggled to find somewhere to rent.”

Richardson McCrea, whose work examines issues like housing and gentrification, was fascinated by co-living and how it had evolved out of very different, more socialist models of collective living, like communes, she says.

“I’m not against that, but I am against this cynical pushing of a socialist idea through a profit-driven, capitalist framework,” she says.

As proposals to build co-living complexes started to crop up in Dublin, this provoked a sense of outrage in her, she says. “I guess it was that this, alongside student accommodation and hotels, were just overtaking the city in a way.”

To widen the scope of the work, Richardson McCrea collaborated with her father, the photographer and artist Ronan McCrea, on a part of the show, bringing in an element of biography.

He contributed a photograph of the old Rialto cinema, an art deco theatre, built circa 1936, according to the National Built Heritage Service.

In November 2019, An Bord Pleanála approved developer Molaga Capital Ltd’s proposal to turn the protected structure into student accommodation.

Richardson McCrea, who now lives between Dublin and Berlin, grew up next door to the cinema, she says. “My grandparents would’ve told me about the cinema when they were younger.”

For the exhibition, her father’s photo will be posted over the billboard outside Project Arts Centre, which both advertises upcoming events and showcases specially made works by visual artists, she says.

“There’s like a full-circleness to it.”But also, by covering over the old poster for a play that had just wrapped up on Friday, she wanted to convey the transient nature of the accommodation too, she says. “That’s important.”