Gallery Talk

New Geneva: Tracing the Memories of a Forgotten Utopia

Fiachra McCarthy & Gjiltinë Isufi

---

‘New Geneva: Tracing the Memories of a Forgotten Utopia’ is a research project engaging with the ruins of Ireland’s lost city, New Geneva. Planned in 1782 as a utopian settlement for exiled Swiss watchmakers, the project was never fully realised. Today, the site bears silent witness to a layered history, from early settler houses to its later transformation into a prison and military barracks.

Combining fieldwork, drawing, videography, and oral histories, our project reconstructs overlooked fragments into one spatial narrative. At its centre is a large-scale hand-drawn axonometric which maps 240 years of New Geneva, resisting linear time to unfold in an entangled cartography of ambitions, traumas, and absences.

Presented at Architecture at the Edge festival, the installation assembles a counter-archive of New Geneva, inviting audiences to reflect on how memory, absence, and fragmentary histories can be reactivated through spatial practice.

---

Project credits

Gjiltinë Isufi is an architect and researcher in Brussels. Her FWO-funded PhD project ‘In Space We Read Trauma: Disclosing Microhistories in Kosovo, 1980-1999’ aims to develop a methodological framework for spatially investigating traumatic experiences. She is also teaching on trauma and space at KU Leuven.

Fiachra is an architect and artist practicing between Ireland and Belgium. Educated at TUD Dublin and KU Leuven Brussels, his interdisciplinary practice explores the intersection of art, architecture and research. He is also co-founder of the Brussels-based art and scenography collective F//AAT.