Border field/apparatuses.

Abstract

Through both our trans-disciplinary practice and one specific project based in and across the Irish border with the UK, we discover, occupy and create (alternate) field conditions of various kinds. Our practice,a place of their own,draws together different bodies of knowledge, experience and practice; art, architecture, urbanism, philosophy, fictioning, family to create new imaginaries and cartographies of the border. The Eile Project is a visual art/research project that uses the subjective, spatial and political concept of borders/bordering to respond to some immediate political/environmental challenges, and is sited on the geo-political border between Ireland and the UK. Paula is from Ballyshannon, grew up between Ballyshannon and Enniskillen (as well in England), and has traversed the Irish border across her life. This border condition has renewed prominence within the maligned ‘Brexit’ negotiations. Border field conditions are densely woven with multiple infrastructures, policies, practices and rituals that interconnect in complex configurations; infrastructural systems such as the long- disused Ulster Canal, and the daily practices of local farmers negotiate the border through dynamic interplays of formal procedure and autonomous, creative and resistant practices. The border field condition is partly determined by various technologies and spaces of security and control; of the monitoring and restricting of movement and of various bodies. Yet it is also the site of many existing and potential spatial, social and relational re-imaginings. We will consider the border field conditions as explored through the Eile Project, and specifically discuss the potentialities of these field configurations through the notion of territorial-apparatuses, which might become the starting point for alternative forms of spatial practice. "When apparatuses shift, they can change history across spacetime (quantum erasure). Apparatuses are not only what has been traditionally understood as the mechanical parts of a system of measurement (Barad, 1998, p. 101-2). They include systems of thinking, objects, spatio-temporal properties, people and more-than-people; they are extremely localized. Apparatuses are phenomena."1 The field conditions (both mapped and created) through the Eile Project are therefore those that, by opening to and involving the earth, human and non-human actors, the organic and in- organic, permit new cartographies, territories and modes of collective practice.

1 Whitney Stark, “Assembled BodiesReconfiguring Quantum Identities,” The Minnesota Review 2017, no. 88 (May 1, 2017): 69–82, https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-3787402.