Developed as part of Film London FLAMIN Fellowship 2021/22

How They Have Performed Their Buildings (Property creates The Other)

1607, Ulster. Hugh O'Neill - de facto ruler of the region & chief irritant to the English in the Nine Years War - flees to Rome.While not without his own faults as a ruler, his absence creates a seismic power gap which the English forces ruthlessly exploit.

Developing on ideas of 'enclosure' + 'improvement' - key in encouraging the shift from feudalism to systemic capitalism in England - the English view Ulster as a laboratory for experimentation with forms of social & property relations for the production of profit and embark on one of their first colonies, the Ulster Plantation.

Developments from the Ulster experiments drive the English global colonial project + the development of global capitalism.

In Ulster, the new colonial settlements are defensive structures built to support the 'escheatment' of land from those living in the region + to sever land from historic modes of use. 'Property' - in the English legal sense - is created + enforced : "Land had to be free from customs and rights which interfered with the most productive use. Land had to become Property."

Other types of use and possession were outlawed and suppressed. A distinction is created amongst people between the included + the excluded and a troubling psychological legacy is created, a distinction between one and 'an other'.

Utilising textual abstractions from records of colonial construction of the time and visual references to the architecture and landscape of inclusion and exclusion (inc. London, Ireland and the Swiss Alps, where the excluded O'Neill meandered on his way to Rome), How They Have Performed Their Buildings evokes the ghosts of, and sense of exclusionary psychological dread emerging from, these old forms of colonial expansion, enclosure, inclusion + exclusion.

A visual and poetic archeology of spatial thought, the film explores the legacy of historic enclosure on spatial epistemology and feeling, a legacy we grapple with today in new forms of exclusion and fear of 'the other', such as nationalism, neo-colonial + corporate expansion into differentiated space + personal spatial distinctions & alienation.

Filmed on location in Ireland, Switzerland & London.

Available to watch here

Alan Cunningham

Alan Cunningham