Who Do You Think You Are?

Athraitheach: changeable; changing; fluctuating; shifting; varying.

Conceptually informed by, and materially embedded in, current technological developments in typeface design, this project, ‘Athraitheach: Who do you think you are?’, (a collaboration between Declan Behan, who designed the typeface, and Clare Bell’s PhD research, which informs this text and the project rationale) takes the form of a responsive “variable font” that, via the visual representation of language, aims to capture and engage with current discourses around linguistic diversity and national, cultural and social identities in Northern Ireland.

In Northern Ireland, as we know, the Irish language is perceived by many to be a divisive symbol of Irish national and cultural identity. Although this is beginning to change, one of the consequences of this identification of the language is that it overlooks and obscures the shared history of the language for Protestant and Catholic, unionist and nationalist communities alike in Northern Ireland.

The social implication arising from this perception of the Irish language, as we heard, was articulated by President Mary Robinson when she stated:
“Too often, in an Irish context, Celtic or Gaelic culture has been identified with Catholicism and nationalism, which has the effect of inhibiting those of the Protestant and Unionist tradition from claiming part of their inheritance. It is surely time to insist that our past and our culture is rich, varied and complex, that it cannot be resolved into narrow, sectarian compartments and that it is open to each of us to claim what is rightfully ours.”

The project aims to demonstrate how language and identity, within specific contexts (such as a conflict situation), become inextricably bound together, frequently being absorbed into, or constitutive of, the process of community and identity construction. By focussing, in this particular instance, on the notional border lodged between Irish and British cultural, social and political identities, as mediated through the material aspects of language, the project hopes to initiate a discussion and exploration of a spectrum of heretofore unrepresented identities, subjectivities and narratives that may be revealed or activated by a less fixed, or fluid, approach to the substantiation and representation of these languages.