Moving pics against a background

SETTLED TRAVELLERS, MOBILE SETTLERS

KATRIN HORNEK

Dienstag, 18. September 2012
19.00 Uhr

 

 

 

For this project, Katrin Hornek continues to work with her key dialectic which organizes her works between move- ment and stasis, legal and illegal, administrative pragmatism and utopian dreaming, looking back and looking for- ward, using architecture as a materialization of social structures. This makes architecture a political construction, both an expression of the systems of which it is a part and a mechanism by which these wider social forces can be questioned, challenged and possibly rebuilt.

While on a residency in Cork, Ireland, Hornek began her research on the indigenous Irish nomadic people, the Irish Travellers. Due to the loss of no-man’s-land, modernization and strict new trespass-laws in the past few decades, they have been forced to settle down. Whilst Travellers are not Sinti and Romanies by blood they lead related lifestyles and are similarly segregated from society.

Interviews were recorded with Cork’s Travelling community from a variety of generations portraying their stages of sedentariness chronologically. The camera follows their stories from life on the road in tents and hand-made barrel- top caravans, to trailers parked by the road side, to government-organized trailer parks on hidden halting-sites, to social housing and finally, for those who adapted to the modernizing of Ireland early enough, to privately owned houses. Settled Travellers talk about their former desires to move into a house, their need for mobility and freedom, their possible cleaner future, their boxed feelings whilst living between four walls and their shift in focus to mainte- nance rather than continuous flow. The imagery switches from architectonical introduction shots to interior details, portraying a capitalization of spaces and minds.

The history of the Travellers is set upon Ireland’s transformation from one of the poorest, rural countries in Western Europe to one of the wealthiest. It’s present day obsessions with property rites, mobility and land ownership is a fundamental part of Irish psyche rooting back to British canonicalisation. Between 1994 and 2006 Ireland had the fastest growing economy in the world, known as ‘Celtic Tiger’, built solely on exploitative property development and speculation. Supported by bad public governance, house prices rose by 519% in less than fifteen years. The fixation with putting down roots was officially manifested in the Housing Act from 2002, which protects private property over cultural traditions by criminalizing trespass and hereby illegalises the Travellers’ way of life. The Irish belief in bricks, mortar and mortgages led to the present financial destruction - leaving highly indebted house-holds, ghost estates and giant empty monoliths like the Cork’s Elysian complex, the tallest yet mostly abandoned building of Ireland.

 

 

 

Settled Travellers, Mobile Settlers
Katrin Hornek
2011, HDV Video, 16:9, 18min, colour, sound