The Tim Robinson Archive – Iarsma Film (2016)
Iarsma: Fragments from the Archive is the Artists in the Archive project initiated by Nessa Cronin, Centre for Irish Studies, NUI Galway, in 2016. Three artists were commissioned to work collaboratively on the theme of landscape in relation to the Tim Robinson Archive housed in the James Hardiman Library, NUI Galway . Composer and musician Tim Collins, dancer and choreographer Ríonach Ní Néill, and visual artist Deirdre O’Mahony worked with Nessa over a six month period to form the Performing Landscapes Collective in order to explore and investigate new ways in which studies of the Irish landscape could be encountered, envisaged and re-imagined through various disciplinary lenses and arts practice. Invited to participate in the Centre for Landscape Studies, UNISCAPE International Conference, Landscape Values: Place and Praxis from 29 June– 2 July 2016 at NUI Galway, the collective used their skills and knowledge to communicate their research through a performative event, and the occasion captured in the following film.
See the live performance of Iarsma, celebrating the Tim Robinson Archive here:
See also, Dr Nessa Cronin on the Iarsma project at The Place of the Wound Conference, Department of Geography, Maynooth University, (18 October 2016)
And the journal article, ‘Cartographies en mouvement: Re-imagining the Irish Landscape through the Tim Robinson Archive‘, Nessa Cronin (2019)
Nessa Cronin
Nessa Cronin is Lecturer in Irish Studies, Centre for Irish Studies, NUI Galway, Ireland and has published widely on various aspects of Irish writing, cultural geography and community mapping practices. She read English and Philosophy for her undergraduate degree at Trinity College, Dublin and received an MA in Continental Philosophy and Literature from Warwick University. She completed her doctoral research at NUI Galway, The Eye of History: Spatiality and Colonial Cartography in Ireland, focused on the visual and linguistic construction of the modern Irish map through a critical examination of four key moments in Irish cartographic history. Nessa is co-editor of Anáil an Bhéil Bheo: Orality and Modern Irish Culture (2009), Landscape Values: Place and Praxis (2016) and the forthcoming volume Lifeworlds: Space, Place and Irish Culture. She is currently completing her monograph on the making of Irish colonial space, Making Space: Cartography and Colonial Governmentality in Ireland (forthcoming). She has been the recipient of 3 Irish Research Council awards, and bursaries from the European Science Foundation and Culture Ireland, and has been awarded visiting fellowships in University of Stanford, Univeristé de Nantes and University of Concordia, Montreal. She also works in the area of Environmental Humanities and Creative Geographies and has co-curated events and exhibitions such as Mapping Spectral Traces IV (Black Box Theatre, Galway 2012), Interpreting Landscape/Rianú Talún, (NUI Galway 2014) and is the Director of Iarsma: Fragments from an Archive, the Tim Robinson Artist-in-the-Archive Project (Galway 2015-16). She works on community mapping projects in Clare, Galway and Mayo with artists, activists and community groups on socially-engaged projects investigating issues concerning place, language and culture in contemporary Ireland.