Lament — Zuza Golińska

For my recent work Lament, I asked eight female singers from St. Anne’s Cathedral Choir in Belfast, led by cathedral organist and Master of Music Jack Wilson, to sing a love song for the former Bank of Ireland building before it enters its last gentrified state and becomes a tourist centre.

Designed by Joseph Vincent Downes and built between 1929 and 1930, this five-story modernist building with a slender tower is one of the few largely unaltered Art Deco examples in Belfast city centre, currently classified with the B+ listing status and unused, with plans to be turned into a £100,000,000 tourism centre project. The restructuring of the building and 4,000-square-meter site surrounding it is expected to be finished by 2028. The building is an early example of the use of a steel frame structure; other materials include Portland limestone, metal window frames, and doors with decorative painted steel panels.

In January of 2012, Occupy Belfast took control over the former Bank of Ireland location as a protest against the lack of affordable social housing and rising homelessness. As one of the protesters stated, “Banks take our houses, so we take their buildings.”. The building was occupied for ten months until Northern Ireland Electricity cut off the power after a police raid in October 2012; since then it has remained disused. 

St. Anne’s Cathedral is located just two minutes away from the corner of North Street and Royal Avenue. It was on one of my walks through the city that I happened to enter a ceremony during which the cathedral choir performed. At the time I did not have the idea of asking the choir to sing a farewell love song for the building. Yet the presence of the voices instantly struck me, probably because of the certain sense of grief in the melody that happened to align with my own personal grieving at the time. Choirs always strike a chord with me; it could be my Catholic past, and hours spent in church for Sunday masses are still weirdly close to my heart. Or it is simply the overwhelming monumentality of choral sounds that I, along with many others, feel moved by.

I fell in love with the building on the corner of North Street and Royal Avenue during my first trip to Belfast. Together with a group of artists, we got invited by the Household team for our first research trip, and we were housed around the corner at Donegall Street. It looked exceptional with the tower topped with a clock facing directly towards the crossing of the streets, its placement and height giving it a slightly dominating position over the surrounding buildings.

Emotional relation to architecture and buildings is a concept that has been clear to me from an early age. Based on specific buildings, their character, and location, I often built my psychogeographical maps in which certain places represent different moods, emotions, and stories. Funnily enough, for years I would avoid some streets and areas of the city just because they would instantly send me back in time, into an old self, past emotions, and worries. Some buildings I would be drawn to; they felt like a shelter, not because of the firmness of their walls but because of how comfortable and safe they made me feel; their floor plans felt soothing, the amount of light was just perfect, the materials of different qualities coming together in a strange symbiosis.

When Household proposed that we interact with the public space, I started to look for a building. Buildings as monuments represent a certain time, style, and aesthetic. Historically valid events happen in them or next to them, at the same time they also remind people of how they were and how they felt in the past. This led me to believe that it should be a building that will become the main character for my work. I found out that the building of the Bank of Ireland will soon be heavily restructured, and I felt that these are the last moments to catch it in its original shape. Not renewed on the outside and inside, cleaner and more commercial looking but just as it is—slowly becoming derelict, left empty with no visitors allowed.

Linger—a love song released in 1993 by the alternative Irish rock band the Cranberries—was rearranged for the choir by Jack especially for this occasion, turning this epic love anthem into a lamentation. The original laments were only sung by women and I wanted to keep the tradition. Dolores O’Riordan, one of the most exceptional voices of the nineties, before joining the band in 1990, also sang in the church choir. The song had a recent comeback on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram, with letting It linger becoming a meme on more than one occasion. Why did it get a new breeze of popularity? Linger was not featured in any recent Netflix or HBO show, it wasn’t covered by a pop star, and it didn’t end up in an extremely popular remix. The state of lingering might be another antidote to contemporary pressure to be productive, efficient, and successful. It might be that letting it linger is, in fact, an anticapitalist activity, a state of prolongation, being on hold, in between tasks and/or functions, while being fully accepting of that state. Too reluctant to change the state of things, whether in a romantic relationship, friendship, or just in relation to the world around you, makes letting it linger a pretty existential catchphrase.

The former Bank of Ireland building is undeniably also lingering. In its current state, it is in between functions: after its public utility phase and occupied period but before its tourist-driven future.