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| The Ballyferriter Prototype (work in progress) |
During my visit to Ireland, specifically the Dingle peninsula, I learned that it had an extremely long continuous record of human settlement, which, in fact, can be traced back to around 10000 years before today, to the mesolithic age. Since then, or maybe even earlier, people have lived on this island, using the typical grey rocks to shape the historic huts, forts, marker stones, graves, observatories or religious sites, more than 2000 dwellings and artifacts are still to be found scattered over the Dingle peninsula today.
Some sites are hard to reach, but many are right in the middle of villages inhabited today, which are often built on pre-historic streets, premises and pastures.
The mild rains coming in with the Golf Stream are thoroughly rotting away all organic materials such as wood. In the end, only the grey rocks remain, piled up into walls, mostly circular, being carved with archaic ornaments or placed in lines and circles.
The superposition of layer upon layer of historic architecture and life occupying the same plot of land, with each successive generation building upon what was built previously, it becomes an interesting occupation to decode the landscape - almost as if the landscape was subjected to an architectonic orchestration that evolves over time. |
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Riasc |
The Riasc monastery - a fairly recently excavated site in the village of Ballyferriter, is a small very early christian remnant from around 300 A.D. Christianisation in Ireland is described as a peaceful and friendly process, not the violent clash that has scarred many other places in the world.
My first activity was to map out the GPS location of the monastery and to virtually re-built its structures, enclosures and entrapments with sound.
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Silent video, showing the self implemented GPS infrastructure
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The Riasc monastery site. |
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