The 8×8 photography and film festival made its way to Trinity on Monday and runs until the end of the week. Curated by Stand – a not-for-profit initiative set up in 2014 in response to a desire among students and young people to learn more about global issues – the festival comes to campuses around the country every year to bring outdoor exhibitions to the students of Ireland.
These award-winning exhibitions showcase instances of injustice and inequality around the world and encourage student participation to end this injustice on a campus level.
From October 15th to 19th outdoor exhibits can be found around Trinity and Marino. The project reached over 17,000 people across seven campuses in 2017 and aims to reach even more this year with exhibits in University College Dublin (UCD), Dublin City University (DCU), Maynooth University, NUI Galway (NUIG), University College Cork (UCC) and Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT), as well as Trinity and Marino. The theme of this year’s exhibition is Identity and Discrimination.
According to its website, Stand aims to “educate and engage students on global justice issues” and hopes to provide students with the tools needed to understand these issues in more detail. Every year, Stand recruits a team of students who curate and design the festival to suit their campus each year. This personalises the festival on a campus basis and gives students the freedom to explore global issues and decide where on campus would be best to tackle them.
The 8×8 festival has been running since 2014 when Stand was created. The initiative is an offshoot of SUAS Educational Development. The Trinity exhibition will be placed outside the Berkeley Library, and Stand will liaise with a number of societies to bring free events and screenings to the students.
These events include a screening of A Girl in the River with DU Amnesty in the Arts Block on Tuesday at 1pm (Room 3051), a showcase of the exhibition itself with Dublin University Photography Association (DUPA) and SUAS Trinity in the pool room in the Graduates Memorial Building (GMB) on Thursday from 6pm to 8pm, and a screening of Free CeCe with Q Soc in the Thomas Davis Theatre on Wednesday at 6pm.
