Silvermines: Becoming Utopia

In many ways this unfolding project has been an attempt to discern the ways in which rural space is ordered and controlled and to locate occluded or counter-hegemonic practices and thinking.

The character of non-metropolitan space is quite different to that of urban space –topographically space tends to be more apparently open and horizontal but subject to an invisible architecture of regulation governing land-use; rural audiences or publics are more dispersed but often less transitory so encounters tend to be quite different; temporality is not linear and progressive as I described earlier but tends to include the past in a more real and concrete way; engagement with nature is integral to the social, economic and cultural matrix and then of course there are areas which are neither urban nor rural.

Silvermines is an area of ecological disaster; seven centuries of mining have left the watercourses and the land impregnated with heavy metals. It is also a beautiful place with an incredibly interesting and complex history. Imagining Silvermines; a psychogeography was developed in response to the passion for local history that I encountered all over Tipperary but particularly in Silvermines.

Using the Space Shuttle I entered into an agreed exchange with the people of the village; I provided a space and a display service arranging whatever material people brought to form the ‘collection’ of a temporary museum. In return they afforded me an opportunity to enquire into the narrative constructions and practices that were used by different groupings within that community to make sense of their place, including nostalgia, racing and burning out cars, graffiti, farming practices, a kind of epic poem tradition peculiar to the area, and also an unpicking of the construction of local history.

In response to that first encounter stage and with the intention of extending the notion of psychogeography that informed it I am developing a publication Silvermines: Becoming Utopia for distribution back into the community that befriended me and vice versa. The intention is to reflect the ‘tactics’ employed by different groups of people to make sense of this place.

The publication is also an attempt to place the project in critical relation to itself, to subvert conventions of ‘reading’ and include the participant-reader in the act of meaning making. To that end the publication will include a number of movable elements and sections, a number of board games designed around the realities of the place, a fictional ‘I’ve Been to Silvermines’ tourist merchandising line based on the legacy of mining for a much-desired but presently absent tourist industry, and a selection of material and maps gathered or generated through the project that may be real or fictional.

The completion of the project is currently funding-dependant and will be developed in collaboration with Clive Moloney, Sally-Ann McFadden (artists who worked with me during the first stage of the project) and Dave Wrenne, graphic designer.