Border fictioning (Eile project)

This paper will explore how the Eile Project (2016- ongoing), an art and spatial research practice, seeks to invent new ways of conceptualising and intervening in borders, as a mode of ecosophical art practice in what Haraway calls the chthulucene. The Eile Project takes form as an investigation of borders using art research methods with the aim to queer the notion of borders, through border-fictioning, border- linking/making; territorial myth-fictioning. It uses multimedia visual art methods, which include the development of experiments (site-specific performances, rituals, audio-visual digital film). The fictional character ‘Eile’ weaves through the experiments. Eile is a changling; a gorgon; a transmuter; a creature, an outside of time, an indeterminate flow. Eile makes and unmakes the UK/Irish borderlands; passing through them as they pass through her. Through performative gestures on the border using a range of materials Eile intervenes into this geopolitical border scene to develop border-fictioning and creating a new ethics and aesthetics of the border. Eile intra-acts with buildings, different species, the bogs, rivers, flora and fauna, caves, mountains, as well as introducing new materials (glitter, smoke, wire) and discourse (legal, historical, political, and cultural etc) in a re-working of current border material-discursive phenomena. The Eile Project investigates the complex intra-relations between human and non-humans; between the matter and discourses of the UK/Irish border in continual entanglement. The presentation will include a presentation of the research, including showing extracts from the Eile films.

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