If the Rocks Could Talk is a poetic, experimental short film exploring the deep connection between land, memory, material, and architecture in Ireland. Centered on a large quartz crystal unearthed during the artist’s self-build in County Wicklow, the rock becomes a sentient narrator reflecting on geological time, local histories, and environmental change.

Drawing on archival material from the Irish Architectural Archive and the Irish Film Institute, along with documentary footage and scripted sequences, the film follows the journey of materials from their extraction to their transformation into architectural elements interwoven with community gatherings and conversations about land, memory, and equity in architecture.

Blending documentary, archival, and poetic fiction elements, the film adopts a meditative visual style, portraying the land as a living entity and architecture as a dialogue between past and present, nature and culture.

Artist Biography

Bryony Dunne is a Wicklow based visual artist and filmmaker whose work explores the intersections of cinema, photography, and ecology. Her films and installations have been presented at the Mosaic Rooms (London), the Irish Film Institute (Dublin), DEPO (Istanbul), Townhouse Gallery (Cairo) and EMST - Museum of contemporary Art Athens, among other venues. She has participated in numerous international film and video festivals, including the Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival (Greece), Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival (France), and Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin. Dunne is a former resident of the Jan van Eyck Academie (Maastricht).

Find out more here.