NONARNIA | UNSETTLEMENT
2016/17
Public performance, installation, video and social media archive
Gentrification / Urban Space / Displacement / Identity / Public Intervention
NONARNIA
NONARNIA is a multi-part project exploring displacement, urban change and the symbolic violence of regeneration in East Belfast. Developed in response to the construction of C.S. Lewis Square and the wider redevelopment of the Newtownards Road area, the work used a domestic wardrobe as a recurring object: part shelter, part monument, part absurd protest structure.
Across a series of performances, public actions and online exchanges, the wardrobe became a way to think about memory, housing, class, fantasy and exclusion. The project moved between street performance, social media participation, processional action and gallery installation, gathering traces of place, humour, grief and resistance.
The work later developed into Unsettlement, an installation at Platform Arts, where documentation, found materials, scaffolding, monitors and sculptural structures reassembled the project as a fragmented archive of urban pressure and contested belonging. Together, NONARNIA / Unsettlement reflects on how places are renamed, reimagined and redeveloped, and what is displaced in the process.
Across a series of performances, public actions and online exchanges, the wardrobe became a way to think about memory, housing, class, fantasy and exclusion. The project moved between street performance, social media participation, processional action and gallery installation, gathering traces of place, humour, grief and resistance.
The work later developed into Unsettlement, an installation at Platform Arts, where documentation, found materials, scaffolding, monitors and sculptural structures reassembled the project as a fragmented archive of urban pressure and contested belonging. Together, NONARNIA / Unsettlement reflects on how places are renamed, reimagined and redeveloped, and what is displaced in the process.
Unsettlement
Unsettlement developed from the public performance project NONARNIA, reworking its materials, images and actions into a gallery installation. The work responded to the redevelopment of East Belfast and the symbolic transformation of the Newtownards Road area through C.S. Lewis Square.
Using scaffolding, monitors, found materials, performance documentation and the recurring image of the wardrobe, Unsettlement presented regeneration as an unstable structure: something built through fantasy, nostalgia, pressure and displacement.
The installation gathered traces of public action, humour and protest into a fragmented architectural form, reflecting on housing, class, memory and belonging in a changing city.
Paul Moore
NONARNIA, 2016
Public performance / participatory project / social media archive
Newtownards Road, East Belfast
Street performance / public intervention / processional action / video / photography / online archive
Documentation: Robin Price, John Boucher
Unsettlement, 2017
Installation
Platform Arts, Belfast
Video / sculptural assemblage / performance documentation / found materials / monitors / scaffolding
Developed from the NONARNIA project
Documentation: Simon Mills and David Bunting
NONARNIA / Unsettlement developed from a series of public actions, performances and installations responding to redevelopment, displacement and the changing identity of East Belfast.
The project used the wardrobe as a recurring object: part domestic structure, part absurd monument, part protest symbol. Moving between street performance, social media participation, processional action and gallery installation, the work explored how fantasy, regeneration and cultural branding can reshape a place, and what becomes unsettled or displaced in the process.