Dec 24, 2024
Nov 23,2024
The What is an Island? project was initiated in 2018 by artist and educator Glenn Loughran (TU Dublin) in collaboration with Ann Davoren, director of Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre and Ailbhe Murphy, former director of Create: The National Development Agency for Collaborative Arts.
Developed at the height of the Brexit negotiations, The project set out to explore the significance of islands and island imaginaries in art and education at a time of social, environmental and technological change.
Situated within the context of the BA in Visual Art on Sherkin Island, the project was formed around a series of local and global artistic research events with island communities, which informed the development of the archipelagic MA Art and Environment, delivered across the islands of West Cork since 2020 by TU Dublin and Uillinn.
The publication What is an Island? Towards a Patchwork Pedagogy for a World Archipelago was launched at the 2024 Earth Rising Festival at IMMA. It captures each iteration of the project, through the Covid 19 pandemic and the emergence of the metaverse. Read an extract below.
The Island of Ireland: Towards an Irish Nissology - Prof. Anne O’ Byrne
A wave of work developing and theorizing the Irish and global archipelagic imaginary is already under way.
In July 2018 a group embarked (literally and figuratively) on a day-long "durational artistic research event" in Roaring Water Bay in Co. Cork, reminiscent of the Hebridean voyages of Richard de Marco in the 1970s. (1)
The event was the first part of a project that has continued with a conceptual "Listening School" that, over three days in 2019, linked the West Cork town of Skibbereen, and the Ecuadorian islands of Jambelí and San Cristóbal.
Project leader Glenn Loughran writes: "Interrogating the western eco-colonial gaze on islands in the Anthropocene, the Listening School developed a pedagogical programme around listening and sounding the archipelago in the Anthropocene." (2)
The third iteration is a digital archipelago, part of a new archipelagic MA in Art and the Environment.
Meanwhile, the Caribbean continues to foment nissological and archipelagic thinking, taking up the provocations of Glissant and Derek Walcott and constantly re-working the experience of island and sea, the wake of the British island empire and the on-going presence of the American continental empire.
The streams and drifts of the North Atlantic touch the shores of Caribbean islands and also the shores of Ireland. Thinking along those sea-paths will help an Irish nissology do its part in dismantling Valery’s European exceptionalism.
As Derrida writes, a decade after his reflections on the headland of Europe and in the last year of his life: "there is no world; there are only islands." (3)
Patchwork Pedagogies: From Island to Archipelago to World - Dr. Glenn Loughran
The What is an Island? project was initiated in 2018 within the geographic context of West Cork, the political context of Brexit and the environmental context of the Anthropocene. (4) It began as an open-ended, experimental journey into the changing nature of islands in contemporary life and an exploration of the characteristics of artistic research and its education.
Through this process the project bridged two educational programmes: the BA in Visual Art on Sherkin Island (TU Dublin) and the MA in Art and Environment (TU Dublin) in the West Cork archipelago. Navigating these points, it cultivated an enquiry into the significance of art education operating at the edges of the university, an art education that links island, archipelago and world.
Moving between the material realties of island life, artistic research and theoretical reflection, the What is an island? project developed a patchwork pedagogy over a period of three years, across physical and virtual islands.
The form of this enquiry was multi-modal, combining live events, performative lectures and critical dialogue with island communities. Motivated by contemporary shifts in political ecology, these events reflected on i) the impact of visual arts education on isolated island communities ii) the development of event-based, artistic research processes, iii) the methodological potential of archipelagic thinking for art education in the Anthropocene.
A central concept throughout the project, archipelagic thinking can be understood as a multifaceted postcolonial framework for thinking about difference, diversity, and relation beyond generic concepts of network and globality. (5)
To think an art education within this context is to consider how it might form a complex assemblage that enables our understanding and interpretation of the geographic and geologic specificity of place.
However, while assemblage theories can support the interconnectedness of island-archipelagic imaginaries at a time of increasing division, it can also lend itself to a conceptual abstraction that misses the entangled, material realities of lived experience on islands. (6)
Alternatively, Island scholars Jonathan Pugh and David Chandler have argued for a deeper understanding of 'patchwork ontologies’ across islands, stating,
Patchwork approaches develop and transform relational ontology so that the modernist imaginary of islands existing in a flat, two-dimensional space, side-by-side, tracing continuities in relation across linear time, is replaced with a more open ontology of spatial and temporal becoming (Glissant, 1997; Last, 2017). (7)
Moving between the material realties of island life, artistic research and theoretical reflection, the What is an island? project developed a patchwork pedagogy over a period of three years, across physical and virtual islands.
Notes
1 Murray, "What Is An Island?"
2 Loughran, "What Is an Island?" Accessed July 13, 2021. Many thanks to Richard Kearney, who participated in the July 2018 event, for this reference.
3 Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II, 9. See also Jonathan Pugh and David Chandler, "There Are Only Islands After the End of the World" in Pugh and Chandler, Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds. My thanks to Glenn Loughran for making this connection.
4 The Anthropocene describes a new geological epoch where human activity has had a significant impact on the planet's climate and ecosystems. It was popularised in the late eighties by ecologist Eugene F. Stoermer and popularised in the 2000s by atmospheric chemist Paul J.Crutzen.
5 Glissant E. (1997) Poetics of Relation. Translated by Wing B. Michigan: University of Michigan Press.
6 Pugh, J. and Chandler, D. (2021) Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds. London: Ubiquity Press. p. 100.
7 Ibid. p. 15.
