'A profound edge': performative negotiations of Belfast

Abstract

The lack of an overarching narrative of place for Northern Ireland, and its territorial conflict, have resulted in fragmented, highly localized and strictly bounded senses of place. This is nowhere more evident than in Belfast, a city profoundly shaped by its sectarian geographies. As a result, what theorists have come to characterize as the relative liberty of urban space is overtly compromised, with movement through and within Belfast being restricted by the policing of its internal boundaries. These difficulties, and their gendered effects, are focused here in relation to the particular experience of artist Sandra Johnston. Johnston made two performative pieces in response and resistance to the spatial constraint she had undergone on the Lower Newtownards Road, a loyalist area of East Belfast. Johnston disrupts the performance of order and control evident in Belfast’s politico-religious territories, and offers a radically alternative negotiation of space, which I argue is personally, communally and politically significant.