Return to Eden: domestic space as archive
Aeppli, Simon (2026) Return to Eden: domestic space as archive. In: Home Frames Conference, 16-17 Jun 2026, Centre For Documentary Research, Queen's University. (Unpublished)
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Abstract: For the past twenty years I have been making first-person and essayistic films about my hometown of Eden and the coastline of North-east Antrim. This presentation draws on a body of films, notebooks, images, anecdotes, and half-heard whispers accumulated over two decades. It focuses on the ideas of houses as containers of story and memory, dereliction, and place as an archive.
Beginning with my first film, Eden (2004) and ending with my most recent, Operation Bogeyman (2025), I document palimpsestic spaces including derelict and inhabited domestic environments around Eden and Carrickfergus - both dominated by the presence of Kilroot Power Station. These sites are presented as layered archives, where personal memory, local myth, material decay and life coexist. As David Markson put it: ‘one is still prone to think of a house as a house, however, even if there is not remarkably much left of it…’ My films capture archival stories of fairy bushes, murders, drownings, Jonathan Swift’s egg house, strange neighbourly disputes, witchcraft, ghosts, and the legacy of the Troubles. They trace how these narratives cling to domestic and abandoned spaces.
The presentation explores the geography of home as it appears in my work, capturing the visual irony, strangeness, and dark humour embedded in this particular part of Northern Ireland.
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