Commissioner: Culture Ireland
Curators: Sara Greavu, Project Arts Centre
Exhibitor: Eimear Walshe
Project Manager: eiletz | ortigas architects
Construction: Rebiennial R3B
ROMANTIC IRELAND is a multi-channel audiovisual project set in the context of an unfinished earthen building, and showing sentimental and dramatic encounters between archetypal characters
from the 19th and 21st centuries. These figures occupy abstract ruins, a site subjected
simultaneously to construction and demolition. The pavilion’s soundtrack is a five
voice work describing the scene of an eviction, composed by Amanda Feery with a libretto by artist Eimear Walshe.
Made against the backdrop of Ireland’s ongoing housing crisis, the installation becomes, a ground of possibility, a ring for Ireland’s generational and class antagonism, a space for loving care and a structure turned into a cold ruin by the social death of eviction.
Eimear’s project, which we had the honor of building, explores the complex power plays created around the collective construction of buildings through the Irish tradition of “meitheal”: a group of workers, neighbors, friends and relatives who come together to build, reap and cooperate by helping each other.
It represents a frenzied and agitated dialogue with the ancient labor-intensive practice of
earthen construction, a form of building with an 11,000-year history and local
declinations around the world.
Raw Earth and Reuse: a lesson in sustainability
We like to think that if the time was ever ripe to have, on the sidelines of the award of a Golden Lion, also that of a Green Lion for the greatest sustainability in the production of an international exhibition, the Irish Pavilion would have had an easy time.
In this regard, we quote Eimear’s words, “The point of earth building is using local materials and knowledge, but obviously it’s not easy to find spare clay in Venice! For Ireland 2024, the team recycled the rammed earth plinths from the 2023 Brazil pavilion, and if you know anyone doing the architecture biennale in 2025, we will have some clay mix to pass on!”
And that’s exactly what it was, for the production of the monolithic elements in the space, the installation of the Brazil Pavilion Golden Lion of the previous Biennale was fully reused.
The rammed-earth blocks made in 2023 had no chemical binders or cement inside them but consisted of a controlled mixture of the purest clays (from the San Marco Furnace in Noale), aggregates and gravel of different grain sizes, as well as earthenware and a minimal amount of water. Beaten with hand tools, compacting the material inside wooden formwork, we obtained granite blocks of exceptional solidity that went perfectly through the entire exhibition period.
And it was because of this ‘natural’ choice that we were then able to regrind the doughs and repeat the beating process in new forms, this time for the Irish pavilion.
This exemplary life cycle not only emphasizes the effectiveness and preciousness of reuse, but more importantly restores value to the material itself and the construction process adopted in execution, as a fundamental and determining part of increased reusability.
The material is not neutral, and earth, and the natural building techniques related to it, are the best of materials in terms of environmental sustainability, non-harmfulness to humans, and absolute reversibility.
P.s. and as Eimear says well, applications are open for the next reuse!
