Settled Travellers, Mobile Settlers

Moving pics against a background
KATRIN HORNEK: Settled Travellers, Mobile Settlers

For this project, Katrin Hornek continues to work with her key dialectic which organizes her works between movement and stasis, legal and illegal, administrative pragmatism and utopian dreaming, looking back and looking forward, using architecture as a materialization of social structures. This makes architecture a political construction, both an expression of the systems of which it is a part and a mechanism by which these wider social forces can be questioned, challenged and possibly rebuilt.

While on a residency in Cork, Ireland, Hornek began her research on the indigenous Irish nomadic people, the Irish Travellers. Due to the loss of no-man’s-land, modernization and strict new trespass-laws in the past few decades, they have been forced to settle down. Their history is set upon Ireland’s transformation from one of the poorest, rural countries in Western Europe to one of the wealthiest. The Irish belief in bricks, mortar and mortgages led to the present financial destruction - leaving highly indebted house-holds, ghost estates and giant empty monoliths.