Debt makes people behave in strange ways. It mirrors and magnifies both voracious human desire and ferocious human fear. It is the emperor without clothes, a toxic masculinity exposed; naked and flaccid. Since this mother of all crashes, it has become the new shame. Being Catholic was once shame. As were cigarettes, being fat, being a whore, uneducated, gay, divorced. Debt is high on the charts of shame.
Part theory, history, popular culture, news, and autobiography, Soft Landing explores the consequences of the Irish economic crash through a deeply personal account of its ramifications, by placing it in an economic grid of money and time. It tracks the ten year period from Ireland’s early economic boom – otherwise known as the ‘Celtic Tiger’ – to the three years following the tragic event that brought our global economy to its brink. It is an account of how neoliberal policy and political power relations can reshape – not just financial markets – but also human life, community and a body politic. I moved from a post-war metropolis to a tiny town called Ballybofey in the North-West region of Ireland in 2004; I left in 2011 – this was my attempt to trace the ways a grandiose political event shaped my family’s shifting identity.
Maria McLintock is an interdisciplinary activist, writer and curator based in London. She holds a Bachelors in History of Art from the University of York (2015) and is currently reading a Masters in Architectural History from the Bartlett School of Architecture (2018) where she took the course Critical Spatial Practice: Site-Writing module with Jane Rendell, David Roberts and Polly Gould. Her research centres on curatorial ethics, specifically in relation to the display of refugee architectures, as well as humanising Ireland’s neoliberalist policies through spatial writing. In 2016, she cofounded System of Systems with designers and researchers Rebecca Glyn-Blanco and Danae Io. SoS explores the intersections of technology, bureaucracy and legality in the European asylum-seeking process, and has thus far involved an exhibition in Athens, the publication of a book and a series of events. Maria works as an Assistant Curator at the Design Museum, London where she co-developed the shows Designers in Residence, Dwelling (2018), David Adjaye: Making Memory (2018) and Beazley Designs of the Year (forthcoming). She also teaches Architectural History and Theory at the School of Architecture, University of Limerick.
systemofsystems.info @MariaMcLintock
As writers, artists and thinkers, our work is a palimpsest of those who have inspired us, as well as our subjecthood. For one who journeys through a practice such as site-writing, it is near impossible for this approach to thinking not to bear huge influence over what comes after. I, for example, am indebted. Since site-writing, my work contains a more localised and ethical approach to histories of architecture, and those who inhabit architecture’s tangible and intangible spaces. Further, site-writing has expanded my definition of what the history of architecture means and what architecture can be; from the micro of buildings, up to the scale of the urban; now from policy, systems and discursive encounters, to people, communities, habits and more.
Jane Rendell, SILVER (Hobart: A Published Event, 2017). 96pp., 32 illustrations.
Valérie Anex, Ghost Estates (photography series, 2011). http://www.valerieanex.com/index.php/ghost-estates/
Rebecca Solnit, The Encyclopaedia of Trouble and Spaciousness (Dublin: Trinity University Press, 2014).
