Eile's Fiction Ecologies

Eile (meaning Other in Irish) is a long-term, transdisciplinary art and spatial practice that critically intervenes in the political, spatial, subjective and ecological spaces of the UK state border on the island of Ireland. It centres on the titular figure Eile, who is imagined as an otherworldly creature of the border. Eile is a transmuter; a shapeshifter; a lobster, a banshee, a flow of water, a gush of wind, who moves in and across the border(lands)through time and space. Through practices of performance, film, sculpture, sound and writing, Eile generates and explores alternative alliances of creatures, flora, fauna and folklore, through a distinct form of fictioning/s, which we call border fictioning/s. In so doing, the aim of Eile is to generate and elucidate alternative imaginaries, epistemes and ontologies of the border in Ireland challenge the inevitability of nation-state borders.

This paper offers reflection and analysis of an exhibition of this work, Eile{Border Fictioning} that we (a place of their own) held at Bloc Projects in Sheffield, UK, in 2022. It does so, to reflect on a new emergent aspect of this praxis, which is concerned with how this historical, experiential and speculative work holds multiplicity and difference together in various ways to evoke multiple ecologies, and subsequently how an important aspect of the anti-colonial praxis of border fictioning is the production of multiple fiction ecologies in the work.