Hedge School 2021 is an itinerant architecture and landscape ‘school’ along the contested border on the island of Ireland from 3 May 2021 – the centenary of Partition in Ireland – to 6 December 2021 – the centenary of the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty.

Hedge schools were illicit forms of education in Ireland in the 17th and 18th centuries when the penal laws banned Catholics from accessing formal education. While this contemporary version of the school is inspired by the tradition of this Irish pedagogical precedent, its focus here is on histories and geographies of the border, as told through its architectures and landscapes.

Hedge School 2021 is structured around four materials which have been identified and documented as part of my ongoing work in and around the border. These materials in some way speak very directly to what the border is actually made of as a means of asking what the border is or might be. They are the starting point for understanding the border and it’s corresponding histories, official and unofficial, on the centenary of Partition in Ireland.

The materials, and where they were originally identified are:

• Breeze blocks, Glenfarne, Co. Leitrim

• Cladding, Belturbet, Co. Cavan

• Classical Columns, Monaghan, Co. Monaghan

• Signage, Strabane, Co. Tyrone

The materials are discussed in relation to three sets of four sites. In quarries, plaster works, cement factories, signmakers I will be interviewing makers of these materials to understand how they are made and what the properties of each are. These conversations with material experts will be recorded and with the consent of the participants will be shared publicly.

These materials themselves will then be unfixed from these sites and reinserted back into the borderland in relation to sites of historical interest. These sites have been chosen where the idiosyncrasies of the border can be seen in different ways. And in each of these sites I will again have a recorded conversation with an invited expert whose work speaks to the site thematically or physically to the vicinity of the site.

These sites are:

• Magilligan’s Strand, Co. Derry: where the Ordnance Survey of Ireland began

• Belfast Port: site of the so-called ‘Irish Sea border’

• Finn Bridge, Co. Monaghan: a former railway bridge entering the Drummully Polyp

• Romeo Two One, Co. Armagh: the last visible remnant of British Army infrastructure in South Armagh

Confirmed participants for these conversations include Kerri ní Dochartaigh, writer and author of ‘Thin Places’ (Canongate, 2021); the National Folklore Collection at UCD; historian Dr Peter Leary, author of ‘Unapproved Routes: Histories of the Irish Border, 1922–72’ (Oxford University Press, 2016); and Professor Katy Hayward, expert on trade, Brexit and the border based at Queen’s University Belfast.

Following the conversations with material experts and invited experts I will deliver a series of lectures about these materials and their corresponding sites in for further locations. These lectures will be allegorical and polyphonic in structure and delivered in English and Irish. They will be broadcast online, with dates of each of these events will be shared in the coming weeks.

These locations are:

• Boa Island, Co. Fermanagh: site of the Caldragh Cemetery and the Boa Island Janus figure

• Black Pig’s Dyke, Co. Leitrim: a Neolithic earthwork following the boundary of ancient Ulster

• The Rainbow Ballroom, Co. Leitrim: a ‘ballroom of romance’ and venue for travelling showbands in Glenfarne

• The Spike Hotel: a former sibín which is cut in two by the border between Armagh and Louth

Through this series of conversations that will be shared publicly, lectures broadcast from a series of sites along the border, and methods of ‘alternative arrangement’, I hope that the nuance of this place that is normally only spoke of in the binary can be shifted or extended somehow.

Hedge School 2021 takes research and practice beyond the archive and the academy. While this is not a project specifically about the politics of the border, it aims to develop understandings of the border in a nuanced way where misunderstandings and binaries are commonplace. It seeks to link sites and people along the border – in real and virtual space – to unpack what living together across borders might mean at the centenary of Partition.

While this border is often looked away from, moved through at high speed or discussed using stereotypes, Hedge School 2021 is an attempt to really look at, to talk to, to sit with and to embrace the border, to discuss what it is right now, through a method of ‘alternative arrangement’ which allows for the development of a more nuanced understanding of what constitutes a borderland, both physically and virtually.

Hedge School 2021 is supported by a Beacon Bursary from UCL Culture.