VENICE — In “ROMANTIC IRELAND,” a multi-channel video installation produced by Eimear Walshe for the Irish Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, a figure stands amid the rough walls of a compacted mud building. Roofless and doorless with a turf floor, the structure might be either half-finished or half-decayed, a meeting point of past and future. Dressed in an old-fashioned tweed skirt and apron as well as a latex fetish mask, the figure clutches a baby, holding it away from the approach of a menacing suited businessman.
As the camera pans closer, it becomes clear that the child is in fact a clod of earth, the same material used to build the walls around them. The maternal character’s arms and clothes become increasingly muddy, symbolizing a complex and emotionally fraught relationship with land at the heart of Walshe’s work. Drawing on the ongoing legacies of late 19th-century land contestation in Ireland, Walshe presents earth as a paradoxical site of safety and violence, community and dispossession, national identity and colonial erasure.
The installation is emblematic of a wider trend at this edition of the Venice Biennale. Artists across several national pavilions are exploring notions of contested land, land restitution, and rematriation — the latter of which signifies the return of objects to their original cultural contexts, avoiding the patriarchal and colonial overtones of “repatriation.” Several have also brought soil itself into the gallery sp.
