When I was first invited to look through the CIRCA archives, I was immediately drawn to Michael Cunningham’s piece on information underload. Information underload is, as defined by Cunningham, ‘about subtracting sounds and pixels instead of their hyperabundance, and how this apparent absence of data generates more meaning. The paradox is that less can mean more, and pure silence or absolute blank space is impossible.[1] At the time I was thinking a lot about the practice of archiving itself and the absences implicit within it based on who decided what was important to archive and how. That there could be as much information and meaning in the absences was really exciting to me.
My writing and research was happening at a time of huge transition. I had moved up to the hill above Kent Station, and my bedroom overlooked the marina. There preparations were being made to take down the R&H Hall, an action amidst a series that was to allow for the regeneration of the area. My workplace, a coffee horsebox, was located right by the Lee Rowing Club. On my cycle to work everyday I passed through what I had known of the area, its ditches and animals and structures, as they were cleared and stripped away. The dust that was the R&H Hall would catch in my eyes. I took the clearing of the land personally- how could the council do this to my memory of a place? I wrote dozens of fragmented descriptions of what I knew of the area, scared to lose any detail to time or ignorance. To me, I was the only one who cared about conserving the area as it was and committing it to writing. And then I considered how many times someone had thought that before me. I’ve lived in Cork city since 2017 — not long at all in the grand scheme of things. I was selfish in my nostalgia. Of course, I didn’t realise this until I was near the end of the project- by which time I had thousands of words with no room for movement, a piece utterly bloated and flat.
I had an epiphany four days before I submitted the piece — how antithetical it was to have written so much in the spirit of information underload. It was a hyperabundance of my nostalgia with no space for a different truth to emerge. The tensions evoked in the act of conservation worked against the freedom offered by imagination.[2] I restarted the piece. The blank page was the most complete the work could be — in adding words and shape to it, I was moving it towards an incomplete map that could be freely explored and expanded upon, without the pressure of a fastidious integrity. The spaces on the page are spaces in the landscape, moments of pause in a place that is heaving with activity, however innocuous. What is on the left is that of the past, the middle the present, the right the future. An attempt at etching some sort of linearity onto the place that wasn’t rooted in my own nostalgia.
After reading this, you’re not supposed to know any more about the marina. Not in the sense of possessing a formal knowledge of it anyway.
ONE
