Land and landscape continue to hold immense social and cultural significance in Ireland. From the early years of the state up to the present day, the West of Ireland has served to represent and signify authenticity and difference. The recent campaign for the Wild Atlantic Way, ‘Ireland's first long-distance touring route’, has made extensive use of tried and tested tropes to reinforce ideas of temporality, wholeness, and continuity in a region that is experiencing an unprecedented period of social, cultural and environmental change.i As national parks are increasingly ‘aesthetically managed’, and place become destination, blogged about in cyberspace, Lucy Lippard recently warned of the danger of ‘nature becoming an irrelevant luxury’.ii In all the noise and brouhaha around the branding “success” of the Wild Atlantic Way there has been little or no discussion on what stakeholders think and feel about it. Rural development programmes are designed to produce a paradigmatic shift; from the rural as a site for agricultural production to the rural as an arena for cultural production, placing a premium on ‘indigenous’ place-based knowledge to add value to tourism services and food products. However, evidence suggests that some farmers are feeling marginalised and estranged by a culture-driven economy that sets a premium on authenticity and ‘real’ food.iii 

      I live in the west of Ireland close to the Burren in County Clare, a ‘high-nature-value’ landscape with a significant and unique ecosystem. The Burren National Park was also the site of a decade-long, bitter environmental conflict that still reverberate in the area. Similar conflicts erupt regularly in rural Ireland, part of a ‘stuck’ narrative about development policies that are primarily about the spectacularisation and commoditisation of place. European Landscape directives encourage and promote farmers as “custodians” but are perceived by many, to privilege habitat over people. I believe that artists can play a key role in this dynamic and this provided the focus for my practice-led, PhD research.iv  

      In 2007 I decided to re-open a former Post Office as a social and cultural exchange point in Killinaboy in North Clare, four miles from the Burren National Park. My question was whether a dialogical aesthetic process might offer the best route to examine and acknowledge differing perspectives on the human, social and natural ecology of the region. I named the space X-PO, and received a Project Award from the Arts Council that enabled the programming of a series of exhibitions, talks and events during the first year of the project. As curator/producer my interest was in seeing what might happen if this symbolically important space became available once more as social interstice. I made it clear from the start that my involvement as director of the project was for the initial activation phase only, however, my involvement as a participant was not. I live near the post office, and I wasn’t planning on moving. I knew that this was a durational commitment, and likely to become a large part of my life. 

      The exhibitions and installations that followed reflected a number of relevant issues; relations between locals and newcomers, the impact of tourism on small rural communities, the effects of regulation on agricultural practices and the local ecology.v Beginning at the most local level X-PO showed how exhibition-making can make visible overlooked, often disregarded, histories and local knowledge. At the conclusion of the first, artist-led phase, the primary objective was for X-PO to become self-sustaining. I held public meetings to discuss how the project should proceed, and a group took on the management, funding and running of the space in September 2008, establishing a membership structure and constitution. Participants make no claim represent ‘community’. X-PO simply fulfils a desire - to meet, sing, share knowledge, information or have a cup of coffee. As long as that desire remains, so too will X-PO. It is open autumn, winter and spring closing in the summer, as it is the busiest time of the farming year.  Clubs meet weekly and include the Burren Ukulele Group (BUG), the X-PO singers, an Irish language club and a drawing group. Monthly talks on aspects of local knowledge fill the building. The Killinaboy Mapping group are the longest running club, dedicated to tracing the oral knowledge of houses, paths, bothereens and roads in Killinaboy Parish onto Ordinance Survey Maps; an extraordinary achievement accomplished on their terms and the ongoing results exhibited at X-PO and other venues almost every year since the group started in 2007. X-PO received €500 from Clare County Arts office and €500 from Burren Connect in 2015 with the remaining rent, heating and public liability costs met by user donations and fundraisers.

X-PO has provided space for coming-together based not on a priori relations or inherited standing, but rather as a visible example of the spectrum of complexity within the social, natural and cultural landscape of the Burren and presented, not as a definitive statement or marquee attraction, but as a moment, a pause in an ongoing process. The public sharing of these insights and local knowledge is not, as in the past, presented through the medium of landscape painting or image making, but through an aesthetic process based on discourse and collaboration. 

On a personal level the experience transformed my practice, generating new strands of research from questions and ideas arising from conversations and interactions in the space. A knowledge exchange process called Mind Meitheal was conceived to bring new perspectives to addressing some of the problems facing rural life in Ireland. The idea was conceived in order to stimulate and bring together a broad cross-section of knowledge forms - local place-based, academic and cultural - generate discussion, and create a space where different knowledge forms have parity in the design of creative strategies for social, cultural, economic and natural sustainability. The Mind Meitheal methodology was used to provide cultural space for questions around the regulation of turf cutting and led to a separate body of work, T.U.R.F. (Transitional Understandings of Rural Futures). The SPUD project also came from conversations at X-PO about ways of growing food; the extent and depth of knowledge shared by participants led to the idea of a potato project as an entry point for a public discourse on food security, scarcity and production. This has since broadened and developed through local, national and international research. SPUD just received a project award from the Arts Council for a film, craft production and food event at Callan Workhouse Guild, curated by artists Hollie Kearns and Rosie Lynch. Local Corofin GP, Dr. Fergus Glynn put forward an idea for a project at X-PO in 2012 with older members of the North Clare community. He observed that that sense of connectedness to the world that he encountered in his oldest patients is becoming increasingly difficult for the rest of us to attain. The project stalled until Tara Byrne, curator for Age and Opportunity asked for a proposal for 1916 celebrations in County Clare. Dr. Glynn agreed and First Citizens Speak, a film of interviews with some of his older patients will screen in glór arts centre in Ennis in May 2016. Social anthropologist Dr. Anne Byrne will serves as the “shadow” ethnographer of the project and highlight any ethical issues around the engagement process and the subsequent public representation of the project.vi

New models of durational practice have challenged perceptions of rural life making visible the complexity of agencies, agendas and projections attached to places and landscapes. Artists and curatorsvii are carrying out important and valuable research, without regular funding. Stakeholders, audiences and communities are being engaged and empowered in ways that reflect the objectives of LEADER programmes. However, it is almost impossible to get national press coverage of public artworks in rural areas. Until this is remedied, important projects, supported by the Arts Council, will remain largely invisible to the very cohort of readers – policy makers – with decision-making power to support the wider development of this kind of work beyond the Arts Council’s scope of influence. If we are ever to move on from the ‘stuck’ narrative of conflict around land, landscape and future development, ‘slow’, situated art practices in rural Ireland will have to be properly sustained and publicly celebrated. 

i. The Wild Atlantic Way is lauded as one of the most successful branding campaigns ever conducted by Fáilte Ireland. A film made to mark the opening of the route repeats keywords; “raw”, “wild”, “rugged”, “unspoiled”, “untamed”, reinforcing romantic, aestheticised perceptions of the West of Ireland.

ii. Lucy R. Lippard “Place and History: Writing Other People’s Memories”, The Intelligence of Place: Topographies and Poetics, a compendium of essays, edited by Jeff Malplas, published by Bloomsbury Press, 2015, 62.

iii. Macken-Walsh, Áine. Macken-Walsh, Áine. Barriers to Change: A Sociological Study of Rural Development in Ireland. Athenry: Teagasc/RERC, 2009. Web. Accessed 23rd Jan. 2009.

iv. Deirdre O’Mahony, New ecologies between rural life and visual culture in the West of Ireland: History, Context, Position, and Art Practice. Doctoral thesis, University of Brighton, Brighton: UK. 2012.

v. For a detailed account of the events, archives and exhibitions at X-PO see see O’Mahony, D., ‘New Ecologies Between Art and Rural Life; Towards A Collaborative Re-Imaging of Place and Community in Rural Ireland.’Ed. Readdick, C., Irish Families and Globalization: Groves Monograph Series, U. Michigan Press, 2014

vi. Anne Byrne and I worked together with the Rinnamona Research group for more see Byrne, A., & O’Mahony, D. (2013). “Revisiting and reframing the anthropological archive”, Irish Journal of Anthropology, 16, 8-15. The idea of a “shadow” curator was originated first put forward by  Nuno Sacramento in relation to curation at Deveron Arts in Huntley, Scotland and adopted here, to an ethnographic role for First Citizens Speak.

vii. To  name just a few: Welcome to the Neighborhood, Askeaton Contemporary Arts curated by artist Michele Horrigan in County Limerick, Workhouse Guild, Workhouse Union, https://www.facebook.com/CallanWorkhouseUnion/ Workhouse Assembly http://www.workhouseassembly.com/about/ and Nimble Spaces http://www.nimblespaces.org/  curated by Hollie Kearns and Rosie Lynch in Callen, Linda Shevlin’s curatorial programming as Curator-in-residence in County Roscommon, the Ground Up programme curated by Fiona Woods for Clare County Arts Office and X-PO have created critical and discursive space for rethinking rurality.