Island Imaginaries
Date: Saturday 30 September - 08 October
Time: 11am - 6pm
Location: Festival Printworks Gallery
Event Organiser
CCAE, Cork Centre for Architectural Education: MArch Staff and Graduates
About
Developed from a two-year study on Irish Islands, this is an exhibition of projects produced by Master's students in Cork Centre for Architectural Education.
Embracing the remote condition of islands along the West Coast of Ireland, we began by recognising their status as places of cultural and literary imagination, fantastical aesthetic contradiction, and subaltern geopolitical fields. Islands are the paradigmatic topos that exist across children’s literature, mythology, theology, utopian and cultural treatises. We will be aware that islands hold a distinct place in the scholarly consciousness – located somewhere between the archipelagic and the panoramic. However, they are, at the same time, susceptible to the impact and threat of environmental change and thereby subject to both social and physical erosion. These are some of the reasons why islands seem so significant and attempting to speculate on the futures of these places, we wanted to define new problematics associated with these fragile terrains. What we see emerging, is the possibility of new islands/spaces – that imagine a tapestry of complex ecological, biogeographical, and cultural conditions that inscribe distinct new atmospheric, social, and temporal registers.