Interface Architecture

Belfast, Ireland - October 2014 - December 2023
 

Focusing on the ‘Interface Areas’ that separate Nationalist and Unionist communities in Belfast, this project examines the potential for transformation of urban areas that have been neglected through the course of political conflict. Underlying this project is a desire to accelerate (in whatever small way) the transformation of the so-called ‘Peace Walls’ that have scarred particular areas of Belfast over the past 50 years. These areas are highly politically sensitive and particularly resistant to change, which suggests that normative modes of architectural production cannot be applied. The aim of the project is therefore to devise new methods of architectural production that acknowledges the very complex situational forces that are at play around these sites and provides a way of working within this complexity. This involves devising ways to analyse and communicate the dynamics of each site, as well as developing a means of proposing agreed levels of change with respect to it. 

The project has a number of differing outputs, from exhibitions and gatherings to digital archives and information feeds. Aspects of the project are described here. See full list of events and activities far below.

 

The Peacewall Archive aims to provide a definitive online documentation of the Belfast 'Peacewalls' in Northern Ireland. Through photography, maps, drawings, video, text and audio, this archive aims to document the steady growth and hesitant removal of interface barriers in Belfast from 1969 to the present day.

This project was instigated after the removal and replacement of the Workman’s Gate Entrance at the Falls/Shankill Interface on Belfast's Lower Springfield Road in April 2015. This particular event confirms the growing fact that the Interfaces/Peacewalls in Belfast are slowly changing, and will do so with growing frequency as we approach the Northern Ireland Executive’s target of complete removal of all interface barriers by 2023.

Locally, the existence of this archive will serve as further evidence that the physical interfaces are going through a process of removal, changing in state from physical artefacts to digital archive.  On a global level, the website will serve as a record, and perhaps a warning to other contested zones about the long-term implications of separation and segregation on urban, architectural and local community levels.

The Peacewall Archive is an 'Interface Architecture' Project, curated by architect James O'Leary of Kreider + O'Leary. 

Peacewalls 50

https://www.peacewall-archive.net/peacewalls-50

An international conference, exhibition and events in Belfast to mark 50 years since the construction of the first ‘Peacewall’ in Northern Ireland on September 10th, 1969. Curated by James O’Leary.

Milk, Confetti, Erratics

EDGE: Situated Practice in Art, Architecture and Urbanism, London, UK - 2017


In 1904, as part of the Memoirs of the Geological Survey of Ireland, geologists Lamplugh et al wrote a paper called ‘The Geology of the Country around Belfast’ where they surveyed the glacial drifts and other superficial deposits around the city, organising this cartographical information into a ‘Table of Formations’. In 2017, The Belfast Interface Project published ‘Interface Barriers, Peacelines and Defensive Architecture’, where they systematically catalogue each ‘peacewall’, barrier, fence and gate used to separate and contain Nationalist and Unionist communities in Northern Ireland. Between these two documents, one can construct an historical, theoretical and material matrix of artifacts, agents, designs and policy related to the fields of conflict, territory and desire that comprise ‘The Interface’. The lecture performance and related filmic essay ‘Milk, Confetti, Erratics: A stratigraphic Survey of the Belfast ’Peacelines’’ works to develop such a matrix, to survey this field. How can we work with drawing, video, mapping and writing to separate and identify one micro-context from another, constructing a case for a ‘congregational understanding of agency’ (Bennet, 2010) related to the assemblage called ‘The Interface’?

A version of this essay was pulblished in as a chapter in Fieldwork for Future Ecologies: Radical Practice for Art and Art-based Research edited by Bridget Crone, Sam Nightingale and Polly Stanton (Eindhoven: Onomatopee, May 2022).

Milk, Confetti, Erratics

A Film Essay by Kreider + O’Leary (2024)

‘Milk Confetti Erratics’, still from lecture performance (2017)

 

Thirteen Points, Expanded

PALISADE, PS², Belfast, Northern Ireland - 2019
Extratextual, Contemporary Galgary, Calgary, Canada - 2018
Wayfaring, &Model, Leeds, UK - 2016


The Interface comprises thirteen different wall clusters or ‘peacelines’ situated throughout Belfast. The ‘Peace Wall’ clusters have existed and developed as markers of sectarian division in Belfast for the past forty-five years. Specifically designed to respond to an evolving set of local actions, events and spaces of conflict, the wall clusters both demarcate a territorial condition and form a backdrop for the performance of expressions of cultural identity. Over many years, the areas around each wall cluster have accumulated deposits and debris, forming a unique and local archive in space and time.

Thirteen Points, Expanded engages specifically with elements of this urban archive. Here, thirteen points – fragments of image, object, action; slices of matter, memory, history, mediation – are identified: one for each of the ‘Peace Wall’ clusters around the Interface areas of Belfast, Northern Ireland.  Each of these becomes the starting point for a piece of writing that seeks to magnify it, hyperbolically; narrate it, fictitiously; study it, obsessively; arrange it, haphazardly. These combine with other elements including still image, moving image and architectural objects. How can we work with these configurations of image, text and objects to investigate and communicate the physical, psychological, emotional and imaginative effects of ‘The Interface’ on the city and its inhabitants?

The work exists in the form of an installation and has been exhibited three times, each time embodying a different configuration of video, text, sound, photography, engraved stone slabs and architectural elements — see images in main carousel above. The images below are stills from the video component. An excerpt of the text relating to this piece was published in The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice edited by Katja Hilevaara, Emily Orley (London: Routledge, April 2018).

This is the Interface

Film | Making | Space / Royal Academy, London, UK - 2017


In this work of media archaeology, a precursor to the video work exhibited as part of Thirteen Points, Expanded, contemporary HD Video footage is overlayed with historical archival footage and sound to render a layered representation of the various 'Interface Areas’ of the city. Composited text presents a commentary on the implementation and resilient longevity of the 'Peacewalls'. Rather than looking at specific walls or clusters of urban barriers, the work positions the INTERFACE as a vast urban system that includes walls, derelict spaces, urban infrastructure, telecommunications, historical events, surveillance, policing and policy documents as all part of the same resilient organism.

This film can be viewed in relation to James O’Leary’s essay Belfast's ‘peace walls': How the politics and policy of 1969–1971 shaped the city's contemporary ‘interface areas' published as a chapter in The Routledge Handbook of Architecture, Urban Space and Politics, Volume I: Violence, Spectacle and Data edited by Nikolina Bobic, Farzaneh Haghighi (London: Routledge, October 2022).

 

Exhibitions:
2019 : PALISADE, Fragments from the ‘Peacewall Archive’ / PS², Belfast, Northern Ireland.
2018 : Thirteen Points, Expanded (3 Channel Video Installation) / Extratextual/ Contemporary Calgary, Canada.
2017 : This is the Interface/ Film | Making | Space /13 Feb, 2017 / Royal Academy, London, UK
2016 : Thirteen Points, Expanded (Edit) / HD Video Video / Are We Human / Istanbul Design Biennial, Turkey.
2016 : Overlay/ Wayfaring / &Model, Leeds, UK
2015 : Fragments of the Peacewall Archive / Installation / The Barbican, London, UK.

Conferences:
2020 : Architecture At The Edge Festival 2020, Galway, Ireland
2019 : PEACEWALLS 50 / Ulster University /PS²/ Linenhall Library, Belfast, Northern Ireland.
2019 : SHARING BORDERS: Institute of Advanced Studies, / Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, London, UK.
2018 : The Weirdness of Walls: BBK Cinema, School of Arts / Birkbeck, London, UK.
2017 : EDGE: Situated Practice in Art, Architecture & Urbanism / Folkestone Triennial, The Bartlett, The Slade / UCL, London, UK.

Performances:
2019 : Peacewalls 50: Peaceline Walk / Immersive Walk / 10 September, 2019 – 16.30 -18.30/ Falls-Shankill Peaceline, Belfast, Northern Ireland.
2019 : Milk, Confetti, Erratics / Rewriting the Map: Literature & Urbanism in Divided Cities,LCB - Literarisches Colloquim Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
2019 : Ungovernable Spaces / Performance / Borders Lecture Series, Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK.
2019 : Kites, Clouds, Filth, Order – Conditions of a Situated Practice / Performance / SAR International Conference on Artistic Research / Opening Keynote / Zurich University of the Arts(Z_hdk), Switzerland. 
2019 : Kites, Clouds, Filth, Order – Conditions of a Situated Practice / Architectural Research Lecture Series, Faculty of Architecture,TU Graz, Austria.
2019 : Kites, Clouds, Filth, Order – Conditions of a Situated Practice / Performance / Floating Peripheries- Mediating the sense of place / Opening Keynote / University of Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland.
2017 : Milk, Confetti, Erratics / Edge: Situated Practice in Art, Architecture & Urbanism / The Slade - The Bartlett - Folkestone Triennial, UK

Lectures:
2020 : Ungovernable Spaces: Lessons from Berlin and Belfast / Architecture At The Edge Festival 2020, Galway, Ireland / [You Tube Video]
2020 : ‘INTERFACE ARCHITECTURE: 50 Years of Belfast ‘Peacewalls’. Architecture Foundation 100 Day Studio: [YouTube Video]
2019 : Learning from 50 Years of Belfast Peacewalls/ CCAE Cork Centre for Architectural Education, Guest Lecture Series, CCAE, Cork, Ireland.
2019 : Peacewalls 50 - History & Context of Belfast Peacewalls/ Peacewalls 50 Conference,Ulster University, Belfast, Northern Ireland.
2019 : Peacewalls 50 - Half a century of Belfast Peacewalls/ Lunchtime Lecture Series, Linen Hall Library, Belfast, Northern Ireland.
2019 : Splatter, Shard, Erratic — A Stratigraphy of the Short Strand - Inner East Interface/ Sharing Borders: Institute of Advanced Studies, / Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, London, UK.
2018 : Kites, Clouds, Filth, Order – Conditions of a Situated Practice/ MULTI-STOREY Lecture Series, Canterbury School of Architecture, University for the Creative Arts, UK

Websites:
2015 : Peacewall Archive / online since 27 Nov, 2015 / www.peacewall-archive.net
2014 : Interface Architecture Twitter Feed/ Twitter Site / online since 10 Mar, 2014 / https://twitter.com/inter_arch