15 Apr Eimear Walshe: 'It always comes back to land' | Conversation

Source Credit:  Content and images from Ocula Magazine.  Read the original article - https://ocula.com/magazine/conversations/eimear-walshe-it-always-comes-back-to-land/

Subverting the format of an instructional guide or lecture, The Land Question: Where the fuck am I supposed to have sex? (2020) shows the artist dressed in white with their hair slicked back, performing the role of a respectable orator. Rendering their professional comportment ambivalent, Walshe expounds their risible quandary of finding a public place for sex in the present day by referencing historical examples of land contestation, direct action, and imperial resistance in Ireland. How these precedents might be repurposed as political strategies against neoliberal and colonial forces today is the question at hand.

Eimear Walshe, The Land Question: Where the fuck am I supposed to have sex? (2020) (still). Single-channel video. 38 mins. Courtesy the artist and Arts Council Collection/Bailiúchán an Chomhairle Ealaíon.

Taking a similar approach is Walshe’s video LAND CRUISER (2022)—a reference to the car used in this instance for sexual prospecting—which is seen through the perspective of a pair of anonymous protagonists in search of indoor or outdoor spaces for sex. Along the way, the desperate duo pay their respects at a memorial to colonial resistance and land rights, but not before meeting prurient deer and an elitist tiger—potential sexual partners in their trysts.

At this year’s Venice Biennale, Walshe will continue to propagate historical perspectives and research, but with an amplified dramaturgical bent that spotlights a soap operatic articulation. In this interview, the artist speaks about ROMANTIC IRELAND at Venice, sex and politics as strange bedfellows, and history’s materiality.

Eimear Walshe, ROMANTIC IRELAND (2023) (production still). Courtesy the artist and Ireland at Venice. Photo: Faolán Carey.

WBHWhat drew you to the history and politics of land in Ireland as a key point of inquiry for your artistic practice?

EWIn Ireland, the question of land and its political history is present in the material culture all around you—in the architecture, geography, and local heritage. The starting point for me was to ask why something looks a particular way, or why something is located in a particular place. If you look at the built environment, you can see a colonial legacy and how that affects the land. If you look at a map, you can see an island that’s divided by colonial partition.

I grew up in Longford beside the ‘Royal’ Canal. The south of Ireland is not a monarchy so having the Royal Canal beside you is an unusual thing. It was just a body of water I walked beside when I was a child, but as I got older I started thinking about how it was made and what it was made for. The canal was built to extract resources, specifically from the Arigna mines, and deliver them to the [British] Empire. It was built by workers who objected to its very existence—there are interesting stories of worker sabotage that I heard as a child and as a teenager.

Eimear Walshe, ROMANTIC IRELAND (2023) (production still). Courtesy the artist and Ireland at Venice. Photo: Faolán Carey.

A couple of towns over, there’s a place called Boyle in Northwest Roscommon. I got to do a project there in 2019 about the relationship between feminism and anti-imperialism in Ireland and India. Right in the middle of it is a huge, grand house called King House. The question it prompts is, ‘Why is this big house here?’ The answer is in the name—the surname ‘King’ belonged to the landlords that my family would have paid their rents to. My grandmother is not local to this town; she is from around 60 kilometres away. When I saw the grandiosity of this building—four stories of double height rooms, a mansion—I wondered how it had come about, and realised there were tenants in a miles-wide circumference paying rent. You can imagine the whole jurisdiction of accumulation around this building to this family. It always comes back to land.

A few years ago I encountered a book edited by Tim Robinson titled Connemara After the Famine: Journal of a Survey of the Martin Estate. Robinson was a writer, artist, and cartographer, who researched Connemara in the west of Ireland. He reproduced this account by Thomas Colville Scott, who was the agent involved in selling an estate stretching from Galway City through Connemara, 200,000 acres as a single estate, after the Great Hunger in the 19th century. In land valuation terms, today the area is regarded as beautiful and desirable, to the extent that holiday homes put pressure on housing for locals, but at the time it was hard to find a buyer because the land was regarded as low quality, and the tenants who survived were impoverished following years of forced starvation.

Eimear Walshe, ROMANTIC IRELAND (2023) (production still). Courtesy the artist and Ireland at Venice. Photo: Faolán Carey.

The revolutionary period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Ireland saw a real coming together of people who wished for national independence and sovereignty from the Empire. This desire wasn’t an abstract notion for most people—it was based on their direct relationship to the land, and being displaced and separated from the means of production. I started looking into these histories around 2016 because of my own housing precarity. In Ireland, the housing system is extremely dysfunctional and a lot of people really suffer. A multifaceted movement has been growing—direct action, occupying derelict buildings, tenants’ unions.

I discovered that in the late 19th century, demands were being made for tenants to have fair rent, security of tenure, and the ability to move on whenever they needed to. The case was made very strongly and coherently—people went to prison and others gave their lives for the cause. Some significant reforms happened, but it relapsed over the 20th century into capitalist expansion and speculation, and these basic goals remain unachieved. That drives a lot of my research and making.

Eimear Walshe, ROMANTIC IRELAND (2023) (production still). Courtesy the artist and Ireland at Venice. Photo: Faolán Carey.

WBHAlthough your research is specific to Ireland, I’m curious to know if you’ve found resonances with other contexts?

EWYes, of course, I think it’s everywhere. The Canada Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2023, curated by Architects Against Housing Alienation, brought together research from multiple groups doing work on housing and land in Canada. One part of the installation showed an illustrated timeline of housing in the Tlicho Dene region, from before contact, through colonisation and modernity, and the parallel timeline of what political environment created these buildings. It showed how Indigenous people, who had been dispossessed through settler colonialism were ‘relocated’ and then ‘provided’ with housing that was not considerate of the Tlicho way of life.

. . . I’m interested in sex as an actor in history more than anything, perhaps most obviously in relation to movements for collective liberation.

Beside this was a video of an interview with an Indigenous woman, describing the trajectory of her housing insecurity. She was disinherited because of gender discrimination. Then, when she took the initiative to house herself by building temporary accommodation, she was met with legislative barriers in the form of planning bylaws, each step she took she was criminalised or pushed out. All of this was happening on stolen land.

It was really enraging to watch, and it’s not the same history of course, but it reminded me of the racist policies the Irish government have enacted on Irish Travellers, trying to legislate a way of life out of existence through housing discrimination. So, without creating false equivalences, I think it’s important to recognise the economic and policy patterns governments around the world make. Every country has its own history and conditions, the housing crisis is not specific to Ireland at all—it’s just accelerated a lot here in the last ten years.

Eimear Walshe, TRADE SCHOOL (2021) (video still). Courtesy the artist.

WBHYou use sex as an entry point to discuss thorny subjects like the Irish housing crisis. Why is it important to you, given the precarity and infrastructural collapse you describe that many of us are living through, to consider pleasure and sex?

EWI probably have to make a distinction between pleasure and sex because I’m interested in sex as an actor in history more than anything, perhaps most obviously in relation to movements for collective liberation. I’ve tried to take this understanding into the history of land and housing activism in Ireland.

For example, if in 19th-century Ireland your feudal lord is charging you extortionate rent, taking the majority of your harvest, and you then revolt, that’s agrarian class war. If your feudal lord also asserts sexual rights to your wife before you on your wedding night or has a say over when you are even allowed to marry her in the first place, and you revolt, of course it’s the class dynamic that makes this violence possible, but I’d contest that your sexual agency is also a motivating factor in that revolt. I suppose a lot of my work argues that these things aren’t separate. All these things—politics, economics, law, and architecture—shape sex, and vice versa; it’s not the only thing at play, but it doesn’t do us any good to ignore it either.

Eimear Walshe, TRADE SCHOOL (2021) (video still). Courtesy the artist.

During the Land Wars in Ireland, there was a sexual scandal involving the president of the Land League, Charles Stewart Parnell. He had a relationship with a married woman. ‘Big deal’, we might say. There was a lot at stake, and there were very real political differences within the Land League, but this scandal ended up being very divisive, and became a significant distraction from the cause at hand. Now do you blame Parnell or do you blame the people in the movement who became fixated on his personal life? Either way, you can’t say it’s not a factor at play.

When I started out working in Ireland, it felt quite easy to make work to do with class, colonisation, and history, but harder to make the case for what sex had to do with any of it. I got this great opportunity with the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven six years ago to design an education programme, which I called the Department of Sexual Revolution Studies.

Eimear Walshe, ROMANTIC IRELAND (2023) (production still). Courtesy the artist and Ireland at Venice. Photo: Faolán Carey.

I felt there was more receptivity in the Netherlands to work around gender and sexuality. Nick Aikens, who at the time worked at the Van Abbe, gave me total carte blanche—I had more freedom to work on this than I’d ever experienced. What was so interesting was that socially, in the Netherlands, I found the Irish taboo was reversed. Speaking about colonisation and history was much more difficult there than in Ireland. For countries so close to each other, they have very different histories.

The weekly subject of the course, which ran through November 2018, was something to do with sexuality—for example, cuckolding, dogging, or kink. But I used these topics as inroads to speak about colonisation or capitalism. This approach allowed me to talk about the material conditions that create desire, and the sorts of conditions in which pleasure is experienced. For example, dogging, which is slang for a type of public sex, is often thought of as just a proclivity, a preference. But dogging due to housing and economic precarity or sexual discrimination is a different construction of desire compared to dogging because you’re into having sex outdoors.

Eimear Walshe, The Land Question: Where the fuck am I supposed to have sex? (2020). Exhibition view: 39th EVA International, Limerick (18 September–15 November 2020). Courtesy the artist and Arts Council Collection/Bailiúchán an Chomhairle Ealaíon.

WBHIt’s clear that you conduct extensive research in preparation for your work. Why do you like to use performance and video, as opposed to other media, to convey your research findings?

EWI think the medium found me. After working with the Van Abbemuseum, I extended my research through a commission for the 2020 EVA International, Limerick’s biennale. I made The Land Question: Where the fuck am I supposed to have sex? (2020), which takes the form of a video essay or performance lecture, or something you’d find on YouTube. It looks at the effects of the housing crisis on people’s personal and sexual agency, and the governmental, economic, and social factors that create these limitations. A lecture allows me to present multiple ideas and have its meaning unfold over time. The other reason I used this format was to spare my friends from listening to me give the same speech every evening, and to harness that energy into something that’s maybe a bit more productive.

. . . humour can be used as a lever [to] go further into discussions about difficult issues, because you can return to a feeling of safety, congeniality, or a baseline togetherness.

The performance lecture, performance video, or video essay as a format didn’t even really feel like a choice. It was more like I needed to do it. I didn’t know what would emerge from the process. I’m excited to return to it. After the Venice project, I’ll be back out in a field talking away to a camera by myself.

Eimear Walshe, The Land Question: Where the fuck am I supposed to have sex? (2020) (still). Single-channel video. 38 mins. Courtesy the artist and Arts Council Collection/Bailiúchán an Chomhairle Ealaíon.

WBHAfter learning about your course at the Van Abbemuseum and watching some of your videos, the word that kept coming up was ‘guidebook’. Your works are like parodies of instructional manuals. They aren’t clinical, prescriptive textbooks, but are still very informative without losing your characteristic wit. Why is humour important to you?

EWThe answer comes from both my early life and my studies. My mother is retired now, but she worked as a teacher, and my father, who has passed away, was a musician. I always saw a link between performing and presenting material to a crowd for different desired outcomes: in my mother’s case, for education; in my father’s case, for entertainment. I studied sculpture at college in Dublin, but wrote my undergraduate thesis on standup comedy. What interested me about that format, of appearing in front of a crowd and hoping for a particular reaction, was a third desired outcome: laughter.

I think humour can be used as a lever to allow you to go further into discussions about difficult issues, because you can return to a feeling of safety, congeniality, or a baseline togetherness. Humour helps you to be resilient through challenging events and subjects. But it is something that I always think about very carefully, because it can end up subverting your aim. I think of it as both a formal and political choice.

Eimear Walshe, ROMANTIC IRELAND (2023) (production still). Courtesy the artist and Ireland at Venice. Photo: Faolán Carey.

WBHFor your presentation at the Venice Biennale, it seems you’ve really amped up the scale of your work. How will your work for Ireland’s pavilion differ, or not differ, from your previous works?

EWI wanted to challenge myself to build on and scale up different parts of the practice. I’ve been lucky in the past to work with brilliant musicians to create soundtracks for video works or live performances—it’s a huge pleasure to work with so many talented people.

. . . the relationship that a person has with the building that shelters them is much more profound than [notions of property or ownership].

For Venice, it’s been a dream come true to work with the incredible composer Amanda Feery, who initially invited me to write a libretto [text] for an opera about an Irish political speech from the 1940s, a period of extreme poverty and social conservatism. Amanda expertly handled this material—the emotion of it, the motivation for writing it. All the conflict and conviction in the singers’ voices moved me beyond words. Hearing the singers perform these words that I’d written was one of the wildest experiences of my life.

Eimear Walshe, ROMANTIC IRELAND (2023) (production still). Courtesy the artist and Ireland at Venice. Photo: Faolán Carey.

I then invited Amanda to have this opera be the soundtrack to the pavilion. So in terms of collaborating with a composer, it was a really significant scaling up of ideas and practices, especially for me as somebody who has no background in opera. I’m lucky to have been a part of that process, and the result is a really significant part of the installation.

There can be pressure to upscale all aspects of production when you get a show in Venice, but with the video for the pavilion, I had the freedom to retain a DIY approach to the process and a sense of immediacy as well. The approach comes from this project my friends and I started called ‘TRADE SCHOOL’. Over the coming years, we are going to make a short video about land, local history, and sexual politics set in each of Ireland’s 32 counties. We’ve made two so far, but we do it on very short time frames and pretty tight budgets. Everybody does everything—everybody is a director, everybody uses the camera, everybody performs, and we shoot on phones so that everyone has fluency with the camera.

There’s a particular kind of improvisational energy. The camera is rolling while it’s being passed back and forth. The swapping of roles in the production is visible in the work. You can take more risks physically with a phone than with an expensive camera, so the images are not so precious. (We dropped the phone into a pond at one point and managed to dry it out and recover the footage.) This was a method that I brought forward for Venice.

Eimear Walshe, ROMANTIC IRELAND (2023) (production still). Courtesy the artist and Ireland at Venice. Photo: Faolán Carey.

Seven dancers, actors, and performers, myself included, performed in this work. I worked with the choreographer Mufutau Yusuf to prepare the improvisation approach. We had an amazing production team led by artist Niamh Moriarty so we were a lot more comfortable than I’m used to while shooting—we weren’t using the car to change our clothes on the side of the road. We were hosted by this great organisation, a build school called Common Knowledge in County Clare.

I wrote the opera from the perspective of a man who is being evicted. The video is set on a building site which anticipates the future home from which the man in the opera will be evicted. The sculpture in which all of this is set is a ruin. There’s a before, during, and after in the life of a building at play. The way that eviction impacts people’s lives alongside the built environment shows this symbiotic dependency between people and houses—it is a very different model compared to property ownership.

In the opera, the man describes his relationship with the house and how he maintains it, and how it in turn maintains him. The removal of the man from his home leads to the destruction of both, and towards the end of the opera you can see the material impact of this.

I’m really excited for people to enter that space and engage with the work; I hope it will be quite immersive. The opera prises housing and land away from notions of property or ownership. I think the relationship that a person has with the building that shelters them is much more profound than that. —[O]

Source Credit:  Content and images from Ocula Magazine.  Read the original article - https://ocula.com/magazine/conversations/eimear-walshe-it-always-comes-back-to-land/