WayMarkers was a long-term social art project created by Irish artist Marilyn Lennon and the Knockatallon Ramblers club in north Co. Monaghan in the Republic of Ireland, in the years just before the UK Brexit vote.
The WayMarkers project engaged in the collaborative mapping of hikers routes that criss-crossed the IRL/UK border on the island of Ireland. This evolved from working with the Knockatallon Ramblers and developing an understanding of their embodied and situated knowledges of place, which has given them a particular perspective of the border between rural Co. Monaghan and the adjoining counties across the border.
Drawing on her own experience of growing up on the same border, Marilyn gained a new perspective as she walked with the club and developed a creative process with the ramblers using artistic, participatory and collaborative methods. The enquiry revealed a deep understanding of place and of the ramblers wider motivations and concerns. Embedded, situated and embodied knowledge of place gives a rambler a particular voice and perspective on 'the border'.
Over time, a desire in the community to create a counter-narrative or a remapping of the territories that the hikers inhabited, began to emerge. The project aimed to share this perspective by creating an alternative cartography owned and managed by hikers.
This engagement led to the co-creation, between the artist, the ramblers club and GIS developer Brian O’Hare, of a prototype online community map.
The independent online community map, tools ramblers to co-author their own maps; to upload trails and routes, digital coordinates, images, videos, sound and text which share to the world a hikers intimate, ecological, cultural knowledge of place.
Creating this map has manifest ramblers imaginings of a different type of border region cartography. The prototype app also holds the future potential to invite multiple authors and clubs to map infinite routes traversing the full length of the borderlands.
This work extends Marilyn's particular interest in the social production of space and the development of new territorialities. The entire artistic enquiry produced artefacts, co-developed and co-created actions, situations, sites of exchange and documentation.