Atlas of Residual Traces

The Douglas Hyde Gallery’s Student Form III, duo project by Ben Malcolmson & Gabriel Coleman, 2021

Like the culverted waters of the Farset and the Poddle, queerness flows through us by way of subterranean channels – dripping from our bodies in grapefruit perspiration, clinging to the clothes we’re sometimes afraid to wear, and pooling in once-a-month warehouse parties and on damp morning park grass. This project emerges out of a desire to render that queerness visible, to be seen and recognized on our own terms rather than surveilled and looked upon as an interloper in the places we call home.

As a native Belfaster and an adopted Dubliner, our collaboration attempts to embed our lived experience in urban landscapes that can be impermeable and at times hostile to the queer body. GPS satellites, used by corporations and governments to surveil movement patterns, allowed us to record digital tracings along our daily routes. LIDAR sensors, which model both terrain and biometrics, capture clouds of points that flow between a representation of a body and a landscape. Embedding these digital traces among an assemblage of historical maps ranging from 1685 until 1838 asserts our own role in co-creating the urban fabrics of Dublin and Belfast, not out of any sense of ownership or mastery, but simply by being in and moving through space.

Text by Gabriel Coleman, 2021