Performing geopower: Eile and border-fictioning

Abstract

Since 2016 we have developed the Eile Project, a transdisciplinary investigation of the border in Ireland that centres around site-responsive performance and audio-visual films in a process and praxis that we call border-fictioning. Through this practice, we ask how the border might be differently understood, experienced, critiqued and altered through affective encounters in the artworks produced between bodies, the earth and sovereign power. In this article, we explore (somewhat experimentally) our notion of border-fictioning in the Eile Project, specifically through one of the piece’s ‘experiments’ (#3 Territories of Eile). We draw on a specific concept, that of geopower, and a specific diffractive method. Geopower, or the forces of the earth itself, allows us to comprehend and conceptualize the geo (earthly, material, affect, power) and the human (bio, anthropic, biopolitics, body, power) together in specific ways. A ‘diffractive’ methodology sees the production of knowledge and meaning as inextricably connected to (entangled with) the social and material practices of the world. The article offers a discussion of that which emerges from a ‘diffractive’ approach to border-fictioning in light of the concept of geopower. We show that geopower enables us to see the ways in which the Eile Project border-fictioning through performance and audio-visual film constitutes a particular kind of capitalization of the earth’s forces – radically different from those of capitalism and sovereign power, and potentially resistant to colonial histories, and suggests new alliances and imaginaries that allow us to work through the complex conditions of the border and partition in Ireland through the entanglement of human (anthropic) and earthly (non-human) concerns within the tensions of the Anthropocene.