The Material-Discursive Border & Territorial-Apparatuses (The Eile Project)

Through our trans-disciplinary practice, a place, of their own , and one specific project based at the UK border with the Irish Republic, we discover, occupy and create (alternate) 'field conditions' of various kinds. Our ongoing art and spatial research in The Eile Project draws together different bodies of knowledge, experience and practice; from art, architecture, urbanism, philosophy, and science, to create new imaginaries and cartographies of the border. This is a particularly apposite time for such an endeavour - as the UK's protracted and contentious manoeuvres to leave the EU create renewed tensions and uncertainties at the Irish Border, and borders and their most brutal and basic spatial manifestation of the wall are increasingly being built around the world, physically and in the collective imagination. We firstly establish the borderlands through a particular reading as material-discursive, to pay attention to its construction through spatial, material and embodied processes, as well as through the concrete work of various discourses. We then explore aspects of our spatial art practice as territorial-apparatuses. We will illustrate how this opens up important complex questions about disciplines, knowledge, ethics, aesthetics, territoriality and the potential of the confluence of art and spatial practice.