Border-fiction(ing)s in Ireland: emergence and potentials of border-fiction(ing)s in the Eile project

Through our art and spatial research practice ‘a place of their own’, we have been working on, and with, the nation-state border in Ireland, since 2013. Since 2018, this practice research has developed within the framework of the Eile project, and from this work, our development of the notion of border fictions and border fictionings has emerged. The aim of Eile, as practice research, is to employ fictioning as a method to re-imagine the border in Ireland through assemblages of performance, film, sound, sculpture, installation, poetry, and prose. The concept of border fictions, and the notion of border fictioning as a method, emerged over the years of developing the various artworks and at some point, we settled on fictions or fictioning as a discursive device to help make sense of the work and what it was doing. In this article we offer a (partial) critical genealogy of the fictions in border fictions and border fictioning as method. explore some critical analyses of nation-state borders in order to elucidate how these borders might themselves be approached as a form of fiction. We then plot a course to show how critical fictioning might be ‘put to use’ as potential tactic to disrupt the hegemony of sovereign borders.