Published for Visual Artist Newsletter, Ireland
July/August 2010

The Architecture of Migration

TITLE: Living room in Gacquinn house
From the series Migration of Architecture
Ballyforan, Co Roscommon, Ireland, 2008

At the turn of the millennium for the first time more people live in cities
than in rural areas. An economy of globalization has created a shift in jobs
from rural areas to cities, and the result has been mass migration and a
displacement of people. I study the home with a focus on the architecture
of migration. By architecture of migration I refer to the physical and
phenomenological framework and structure of migration and its effect on
memory and the idea of home. In studying the home I have extensively
photographed abandoned homes in Co. Roscommon: a landscape scattered with abandoned family homes which now commonly stand adjacent to large newly purpose built luxury homes. The thriving economy of the Celtic Tiger caused a shift from a largely rural based economy to an urban one. Until the early 1970s, rural Ireland was an agricultural economy. As experienced globally these economic changes culminated in the eventual decline of full- time family farming and led to mass migration from rural to urban areas. As the relationship between the farm and the home changed, the old family homes became abandoned. Unlike other parts of Europe where people chose to renovate and build onto older homes Ireland choose newly built homes instead. On a superficial level the abandoned homes are the ruins of rural displacement and a changing economy. But on a deeper reading the ruins symbolize a social change in the Irish subconscious.

I have been strongly influenced by Gaston Bachelard’s, ‘The Poetics of
Space’. His text instigates a look beyond the physical space and prompts a reading of home not just through the language of architecture but though the phenomenological language of sociology and ethnography. In
Bachelard’s, ‘The Poetics of Space’, he describes the home as ‘inhabited
space as the non I - the I that protects the I’ 1. He presents the home not only as a means of shelter but also as a means to shelter the imagination. The home geometrically structures our physical self and also gives physical structure for our unconscious. Only by fully understanding the many facets that the architecture of home represents can we appreciate the allegories that it contains and the anthropological value of the ruined home. Unexpectedly, yet quite appropriately, butterflies were the catalyst for my next phase of exploration. It was my study of the architecture of migration that led me to look at the migration of animals and insects in nature. I became particularly fascinated with the Monarch butterfly and to the state of Michoacán, in Central Mexico. The Monarchs migration serves as a unique case in the natural world that informs my study of human migration. Culturally and historically, there are many similarities between Mexico and Ireland, in its cultures and histories: both sharing a history of colonisation and Catholicism and most recently a long history of emigration and migration. This shared history can be found in the Michoacán region in Central Mexico in particular. As with Ireland, migration has become part of its culture and heritage and its rural landscape shows this effect with abandoned homes scattered in every village.


TITLE: Circannual Rhythm, 2010
Stop animation
Still from DVD

One of the main factors, however, that drew me to Michoacán is that it is
also home to the unique natural phenomenon of the Monarch Butterfly. The annual migration of the Monarch Butterfly is one of nature's greatest
mysteries and events. Every year approx 300 million butterflies migrate
north to Canada and return every winter to the Mariposa Monarca Biosphere Reserve. The life span of the butterfly is extremely short and incredibly the returning butterflies are four to five generations separated from the monarch populations that make this long migration. Science cannot account for this and propose that the butterflies use the sun’s position, or the earth’s magnetic field, to determine which way is south, but how the monarchs find the exact groves each year remains inscrutable. Local myth suggests the monarchs are the returning spirits of their deceased relatives, mysteriously arriving at the same time each year, coinciding with November 1st, the Day of the Dead. The butterfly shows the circannual rhythm that exists in nature. The monarch butterflies have an internal clock and internal memory that allows them to navigate back to their ‘home’. Their memory lasts four generations and then the cycle begins again. I was inexplicably drawn to see this phenomenon, which then raised many questions about human memory and migration. How many generations do human migrants have internal memory? And how is migratory memory passed between generations of humans? After filming the Monarch butterflies in the Sierra Madre Mountains (and thanks to the hospitality of the Hernandez family), I
then focused on one site of human migration in a small village called San
Pedro near Morelia. A local family, the Hernandez’ kindly opened their
home to me. Many of the extended families have migrated to the US and
there are four empty homes left alongside theirs. Annually the migrated
families return with their children and grandchildren. On one such visit the
Hernandez family wrote their names in the cemented ground. The next
generations inscribed their mark on the home and created a physical link to the place.


TITLE: Family visit in 2006
From the series Migration of Architecture
San Pedro, Michoachan, Mexico, 2010

Unlike Ireland, many of the abandoned homes in Michoacán, Mexico are
kept in good condition by the families that remain, and are preserved for
the migrants’ annual return ‘home’. Therefore, while abandoned homes in
rural Mexico are due to the economic situation, they show the psychological state of the migrants who have a deep-rooted connection with the old homes. Just as the butterflies make their annual journey back to Mexico, so do the migrants and their children; the next generation with an internal memory of home. The project, that began in order to correlate the comparisons between both countries and its relationship to migration,
actually highlighted the differences between the two and in doing so
accentuates the current social and psychological state of both societies. In bringing these two case studies together it shows that the abandoned home, the ruin, represents more about the present than about the past. Home often symbolises shelter, safety and stability and gives us a sense of place. The home acts as the point from which we view the world, on the inside looking out. My investigations focus on abandoned homes and are realized through the documentation, analysis, and interpretation of architecture and the locality of the spaces. Our relationship with the buildings shows the internal state of society and the cultural anxieties of our time. In Ireland there is a clear separation from the abandoned homes, highlighting the social separation from what the old homes still represent. Not just shelters of the past but shelters of those memories and dreams within. In studying a specific local, the ruins manifest a materiality of a collective memory. By observing the home in ruin, the ‘fixed perspective’ of home is flipped and the focus shifts beyond that of place. We are then positioned to observing internally but from the outside in: viewing from the outside looking into a collective memory. The ruined home articulates and memorializes the instability and the fleeting nature of all things and the ruinous nature of our time. By observing the home as a ruin, the home becomes part of the landscape. As Lucy Lippard raises in ‘The Lure of the Local’, the homes which were once internal places viewed from the inside have now become just backdrops in the landscape and have fallen into a collective memory of personal space.


TITLE: Living room in Hernendez house
From the series Migration of Architecture
San Pedro, Michoachan, Mexico, 2010

The process of viewing a photographic document of these ruins allows a
gaze at a collective memory and offers an alternative cartography. The
geography of landscape is complex in a time when even humans have
become a moveable commodity. How the ruins remain say more about
society and current attitudes than about any nostalgic reference to the
past. Rather than seeing my practice as an archeological exercise, I see it as an ethnographic study into the topography of society. As much as Irish
society has ‘abandoned’ the old family homes and chosen ‘new’ homes to
root themselves, many have chosen not to demolish them. The landscape
has become a physical manifestation of the subconscious. Although the old structures have faded into the landscape, the remnants remain, the ruin confronting and posing many questions. Just as the ruins of the home are falling into memory so are the memories falling into ruin. When looking at the ruin we are not just looking at an historical ruin but the ruin of dream and sub consciousness and collective memory. Just as the ruin acts as a bridge to the past and a testament to our current social situation so too does the photographic image of the ruin. As Roland Barthes wrote,’ every photograph is a certificate of presence’ 2 so the photograph of a ruin can help us position the past in the present and act as a testament to the now. By confronting the ruin and working through the physical rubbles of memory, we can reconcile the presence of the past and move towards possible constructions for the future. The image acts as a social document, and as a visual to articulate and reconcile the changing reality. It acts as a‘guide to situating ourselves in a landscape of time’. 3

1. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 1958.
2. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
3. Rebecca Solnit, The Ruins of Memory from Mark Kletts book, After The
Ruins, 2006