The Eile project experiment 3

Abstract

The Eile Project is an ongoing investigation of borders using art research methods. The research aims to investigate border subjectivities, border-linking/making; territorial fictioning, based in, across, and about the geopolitical border between Ireland and the UK. It uses multimedia visual art research that uses the subjective, spatial, political and imaginative, yet highly contested, concept of borders/bordering to respond to some of the immediate political and environmental challenges of our time. The Eile Project takes places on the contested UK border which crosses the island of Ireland dividing the land into the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. The investigation seeks to generate new ways of thinking of this border through the creation a new aesthetics generated mainly through site-specific performance acts by the character ‘Eile’. Through performative gestures using a range of materials Eile intervenes into this geopolitical border scene to develop a border-fictioning. ‘Eile’ is a creature of the border who has been summoned to interact with buildings, different species, the bogs, rivers, flora and fauna, caves, mountains and so on against the unfolding socio-political drama of this border, which at present takes the form of ‘Brexit’ (but previously has had many other iterations, such as ‘The Troubles’). This work has its roots in Paula’s family history. Paula’s family are from Ballyshannon, County Donegal, a small border town in the Republic of Ireland. Her mother was brought up in an Irish Protestant family and her father as Irish Catholic. Paula was born in 1975 at the height of the so-called ‘Troubles’ and during her childhood lived in England, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, regularly traversing the border. This brings a particular ‘situated knowledge’ (knowing as partial and located, and generated through interactions, Donna Haraway) to this border research practice, which is used in when Paula performs ‘Eile’ on the border-sites. This output relates to a site-specific performance that took place at the border RUC barracks in Belleek, Co. Donegal. From this performance we made a short film triptych which is available on Vimeo