Ungovernable Spaces

Community Formation and the Poetics of Resistance

Kristen Kreider and James O'Leary
London: Bloomsbury (2025, forthcoming)

What does it mean to be governed and what does it mean to resist? This book responds to these questions, presenting a study of how communities form amidst social and political turbulence. Working with methods of situated practice and communicating this through related modes of writing and image-making, the authors consider a range of global case studies – including the destruction of the Mecca apartment building in Chicago’s South Side in 1952, following a decade of resistance from the building’s predominately African American occupants; M.K. Gandhi’s activism for political, cultural and economic independence for India including the Salt March protest of 1930, daily practice of spinning and intermittent fasts; the Ciudad Abierta (Open City), a radical pedagogical experiment started by a poet and an architect in Valparaíso, Chile in 1970; and the urban ecologies developing on either side of the ‘peace walls’ of Belfast, Northern Ireland in the wake of ‘the Troubles’ and peace agreement of 1998. Structured via four spatial configurations, the grid, the charka, the constellation, and the cluster, each case study explores community formation through artistic and aesthetic practices that resist and unsettle forms of hegemonic order to make something new, something different, something unknown of the world.

Field Poetics

Kristen Kreider and James O'Leary
London: MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE (April 2018)

Field Poetics explores five different places, each with a story to tell, each with a unique mode, form, and vocal register through which to tell it. The writing journeys through a sequence of Andrei Tarkovsky’s ‘film images’, the multi-dimensional, interconnected space machine of the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, maritime pockets on the edge of the city of Lisbon, a history of silence and surveillance in a derelict wing of the Cork City Gaol, and the transposition of a centuries-old landscape aesthetic through video, performance, and pop in fourteen locations across the Kansai region of Japan. Sometimes documentation, sometimes score, and sometimes the work of a poet and an architect engaging with these sites, Field Poetics spins, suspends, and extends a relation to place.

'Field Poetics is the second volume from this longstanding partnership between a poet and an architect. With fluidity and thoughtfulness it uses what such a meeting may enable. Through sparse and precise poetic pieces and diagrammatic ink sketches, this work operates like a dystopian travel journal, making up a universe of flat lines and temporary stations through a series of real and unreal places. Architexture of un-dwellings.'
- Caroline Bergvall

Available to order here.

Poetics & Place

The Architecture of Sign, Subjects and Site

Kristen Kreider
London: I.B. Tauris (January 2014)

How do artworks 'speak', and how do we 'listen' and respond? These questions underlie the investigation here of Roni Horn's Pair Object III: For Two Rooms, Emily Dickinson's later manuscripts, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Passages Paysages, Fiona Templeton's Cells of Release and Jenny Holzer's Lustmord. The tenets of critical performance, art-writing and site-writing inform the critical method used in Poetics and Place. Each chapter is dedicated to one of these five artworks, and is arranged in order to fulfill three main objectives: to understand how the artworks generate meaning through a material poetics in relation to place; to develop a critical methodology for engaging with them; and to investigate their ethical potential and political imperative.

‘This book makes words break open the order of things. It is intense and meticulous thinking; indeed, it shows you what research can be. If your care is for art writing and the relations we make between ourselves, our cultural objects, practices and theories, then you must read this book, and read it yet again.’
- Yve Lomax, Professor of Art Writing, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK

Available to order here.

Eight Rooms

Kristen Kreider and James O'Leary with Zander Olsen, photography
Unnameable Press (London: 2005)

Working in relation to a derelict wing of the Cork City Gaol or ‘Women’s Prison,’ the interdisciplinary project Eight Rooms explores notions of site through  poetry, art and architecture. The project was developed in response to a commission from the Triskel Arts Centre in Cork, Ireland as part of their program for the Cork European Capital of Culture 2005. The book Eight Rooms is a limited edition artist’s book designed specifically to document this project.

The book is designed as multiple pages within a slip case. This includes an Introduction with an overview of the project and a Conclusion with a copy of the poem ‘Concrete Enclosure,’ written collaboratively with prisoners in a workshop held at Limerick Prison. The main body of the book comprises eight individually folded pages. Each page bears, on its recto, one of the poems from the sequence ‘Eight Voices.’ On the verso are printed images of site and process including maps, drawings, photographs, stills, sketches and scans of found objects. This includes a photographic sequence by the photographer Zander Olsen. 

A copy of the book is available for purchase (£10, including postage) by contacting us here.

Peacwall Archive

http://www.peacewall-archive.net

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. 

Mountain of Art Research (MARs)

http://m-a-r-s.online

A bit like a research centre, except it’s a mountain, MARs supported and promoted the development of innovative art research across a range of art practices including - but not limited to - studio, curatorial, critical and art-writing, situated, participatory and interdisciplinary practice. Committed to rigorous formal experimentation, maverick conceptual exploration and socially-engaged articulation, MARs supported the singular development of practice with a political imperative; emphasises the material ‘stuff’ of art research as much as its speculative possibilities. As both platform and ethos, MARs aimed to challenge received ideas and habits; to promote new ways of thinking and being both in and out of this world.

The Mountain of Art Research (MARs) was initiated by Professor Kristen Kreider at the Department of Art at Goldsmiths College while Director of the Art Research Programme from 2016-2020.

Milk, Confetti, Erratics

A Stratigraphy of the Landscape of the Belfast ‘Peace Walls’

Kristen Kreider and James O'Leary 
Book 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)

Bringing together contributions by artists, writers and theorists, ‘Fieldwork for Future Ecologies’ addresses the role that art practice and art-based research plays in expanding notions of fieldwork. At once a handbook for research and practice and a philosophical speculation, this book offers the unique opportunity to explore ways of working within vastly diverse climates and terrains using image, sound, movement and other sensing technologies. It also offers more creative and speculative interventions into the idea and location of the ‘field’ itself.

For their contribution to the book, Kreider + O’Leary 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 ‘Peace Walls’ used to separate and contain Nationalist and Unionist communities in Northern Ireland. Working with drawing, video, mapping and writing to separate and identify one micro-context from another, they construct a case for a ‘congregational understanding of agency’ (Bennet, 2010) related to the assemblage called ‘The Interface’.

Available to order here.

Belfast's ‘peace walls'

How the politics and policy of 1969–1971 shaped the city's contemporary ‘interface areas'

James O'Leary 
Book 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)

Considering both ongoing and unprecedented global problems – from violence and urban warfare, the refugee crisis, borderization, detention camps, terrorist attacks to capitalist urbanization, inequity, social unrest and climate change – this handbook provides a comprehensive and multidisciplinary research focused on the complex nexus of politics, architecture and urban space. For his contribution, James O’Leary examines the political and policy circumstances that led to the construction of the first ‘peace wall’ in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He outlines the escalation of political tensions in the key timeframe between 1969 and 1971, resulting in policy response in the form of the (then) secret Taylor Report (1971) that aimed to address problems arising in areas of confrontation in the city. The chapter explores the implications of these policy decisions in relation to the contemporary urban fabric of Belfast, with walls that communicate through their opacity, scale and material condition. Massive in scale, they generate ‘shadow spaces’ and voids marked by dereliction and abandonment, acting as magnets for clashes and riots in times of unrest.

Available to order here.

Volver a No Saber

Poetry, Architecture and the Beginnings of Open City

Kristen Kreider and James O'Leary 
Book chapter in The Routledge Companion on Architecture, Literature and The City edited by Jonathan Charley.
Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press (March 2019)

This Companion breaks new ground in our knowledge and understanding of the diverse relationships between literature, architecture, and the city, which together form a field of interdisciplinary research that is one of the most innovative and exciting to have emerged in recent years. For their contribution, Kreider + O’Leary present the essay ‘Volver a No Saber: Poetry, Architecture and the Beginnings of Open City’.

Functioning as both a metaphorical space and a living, working community, Open City began in 1970. Conceived as a radical pedagogical experiment, the city was founded by the Argentinian poet, Godofrodo Iommi, the Chilean architect, Alfredo Cruz, and other members of the Valparaíso School. Drawing from our site visit and study, we begin with specific architectural details to discuss Open City’s ethos, key principles and practices, interspersing this with a story of its beginnings. Moving through the site, shifting modalities and vocal registers, we posit Open City as a community of teaching, research, making and, ultimately, a form of resistance.

Available to order here.

Prairie (Argo)

Kristen Kreider and James O'Leary 
Book chapter in Seeing Degree Zero: Barthes/Burgin and Political Aesthetics by Ryan Bishop, Sunil Manghani
Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press (March 2019)

In the fields of literature and the visual arts, 'zero degree' represents a neutral aesthetic situated in response to, and outside of, the dominant cultural order. Taking Roland Barthes’ 1953 book Writing Degree Zero as just one starting point, this volume examines the historical, theoretical and visual impact of the term and draws directly upon the editors’ ongoing collaboration with artist and writer Victor Burgin.

For their contribution to the book, Kreider + O’Leary mobilise Barthes’ image of the Argo as a critical tool through which to contemplate Victor Burgin’s work Prairie (2015). Thus performing the artwork through sequences of writing and image composites, they navigate issues of erasure, resistance and potentiality; the relation between aesthetics and politics; the role that rhythm plays in this and the homogenising impulse of the grid; Whiteness, Blackness, Nativeness; ornament and crime; the importance of story and myth for our conception of the human and for imagining new forms of life. The aim, ultimately, is to suggest how racial and spatial politics together with a complex aesthetic comprising – and combining – aspects of layering, rhythm and figure inform an understanding of the relationship between politics and aesthetics, eventually suggesting new configurations of the social.

Available to order here.

Thirteen Points, Expanded

Kristen Kreider and James O'Leary 
Book chapter in The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice edited by Katja Hilevaara, Emily Orley
London: Routledge (April 2018)

Built around a diverse selection of writings from leading researcher-practitioners and emerging artists in a variety of fields, The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice celebrates the extraordinary range of possibilities available when writing about one’s own work and the work one is inspired by. It re-thinks the conventions of the scholarly output to propose that critical writing be understood as an integral part of the artistic process, and even as artwork in its own right. For their contribution to the book, Kreider + O’Leary present an excerpt from ‘Thirteen Points, Expanded.’

Thirteen points – fragments of image, object, action; slices of matter, memory, history, mediation – are identified: one for each of the ‘Peace Wall’ clusters situated in and around the city 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. The ‘Peace Wall’ clusters have existed and developed as markers of sectarian division in Belfast for the past forty-five years. This writing seeks to explore the physical, psychological, emotional and imaginative effects of this on the city.

Please see the companion site to the book, http://www.creativecritic.co.uk, where some of the chapters have become unfixed from the page.

Available to order here.

+ Click here for 'Particles of Moisture' drawing series.

Particles of Moisture and other Substance Suspended in Air and Visible as Clouds

Approaching Ambiguity through Site-Related Creative Practice

Kristen Kreider and James O'Leary 
Book chapter in Drawing Ambiguity: Beside the Lines of Contemporary Art edited by Phil Sawdon and Russ Marshell
London: I.B. Tauris (March 2015)

Drawing Ambiguity: Beside the Lines of Contemporary Art is the third book in the innovative TRACEY series on contemporary drawing. Drawing Ambiguity builds upon its predecessors, Drawing Now: Between the Lines of Contemporary Art, 2007 and Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art, 2012, by proposing that a position of ambiguity, a lack of definition, is not only desirable within fine art drawing but also necessary - having the capacity to enable and sustain drawing practices. What happens if we are ambivalent to what is a drawing, or what drawing is? 

In their chapter 'Particles of Moisture and other Substance Suspended in Air and Visible as Clouds', the collaborative pair Kreider + O'Leary outline a history, theory and practice of site-related creative practices across poetry, art and architecture. In setting this out, they argue for the importance of ambiguity in such practices, including their own. Alongside this written component, Kreider + O’Leary engage with an expanded drawing technique to delineate the specific narrative of one of their site-related projects, Video Shakkei.

Available to order here.
 

 + Click here for 'Open City' artists pages.

Open City

Kristen Kreider and James O'Leary
Artists pages in Performance Research: On Poetics & Performance 2015 (Volume 20:1): 70-76.

In a series of word-and-image pages, the collaborative pair Kreider + O'Leary reflect on their site visit to the Open City in Valparaiso, Chile. Situated in the sand dunes just off coast of the Pacific ocean, this radical pedagogical experiment was founded in 1971 by the Chilean architect Alberto Cruz and Argentinean poet Godofredo Iommi. Open City is as much a school as it is an urban laboratory and the embodiment of a utopian ideal. Here architecture is constructed on a foundation of poetry and shifting sand and, as students of the Open City, Kreider + O'Leary examine the place in detail. In this series of word-and-image pages they present these findings in a loose taxonomy: a configuration of words and lines; a cifra reflective of their study of site and that marks the beginning of their story of Open City.

Journal issue available from Taylor & Francis here.

+ Click here for 'Time, Place and Empathy' drawing series.

Time, Place and Empathy

The Poetics and Phenomenology of Andrei Tarkovsky's Film Image

Kristen Kreider and James O'Leary
Journal article in Visual Studies 2013 (Volume 28:1): 1-16

Acclaimed Russian film-maker Andrei Tarkovksy’s specific understanding of what constitutes the ‘film image’ is outlined in his collection of writings, Sculpting in Time (1986), and evidenced by his body of film work. Our aim in this article is to identify the specificity of Tarkovsky’s theory and practice of the film image and to argue that the film image is a meaningful composite of poetic, spatial and material properties. We unpack this complexity through a close, careful and attenuated reading of a single scene from Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia (1983).

In this scene, the film’s protagonist – the poet, Gorchakov – carries a lit candle across the expanse of the Santa Catarina pool. The pool, a geothermal bath in the Tuscan hillside town of Bagno Vignoni, Italy, is emptied for this shot, but still steaming. This infuses the film image with atmospheric qualities ofplace. We read these qualities in relation to Tarkovsky’s use of symbol, the relationship of this scene to others in the context of the filmic narrative, and the filmic syntax of the long take and tracking shot. We also examine how the film image is received, as a projection, by an embodied recipient, and to what effect. Through this discussion, we defend Tarkovsky’s work against charges that it embodies a naïve realism, exposing the critical potential inherent in Tarkovsky’s nostalgic impulse.

Available from Taylor & Francis on-line here.
 

+ Click here for 'Memento Mori' artists pages.

Memento Mori

Kristen Kreider and James O'Leary
Artists pages in Performance Research: Memento Mori 2010 (Volume 15:1): 66-71.

Over the past number of years, the collaborative pair Kreider + O’Leary have worked on projects in Japan (Video Shakkei), Italy (Gorchakov’s Wish) and Ireland (Eight Rooms).  During their visits to each of these locations they have often stopped to engage with places of cultural and spiritual significance including holy wells, cemetaries and burial sites in acts of observation, perhaps even contemplation. 'Memento Mori'  is a series of word-and-image composites relating to this experience.

The images are photographs taken at the following locations: Isola di San Michele (‘Island of the Dead’) in Venice, Italy; Daigh Bhríde (St. Brigid’s Well) in Liscannor, County Clare, Ireland'; a burial site in Tenryu-ji (天龍寺) in Ukyo Ward, Kyoto, Japan. The text, some of which is comprised of found materials from the specific locations, is a poetic meditation on death and remembrance. 

Journal issue available from Taylor & Francis here.