#TransitGateway - As part of “Port Perspectives”, Transit Gateway is a project that documents the transitional changes of the shape of Dublin Port from its medieval shoreline to its current infrastructure.
Transit Gateway is an artistic mapping cartography that shows the changing connections of the city and the port throughout the years, and how the port as a gateway creates a vital connection of the city with the wider world. In collaboration with partners and the local community, the artist Silvia Loeffler has been commissioned by Dublin Port Company to create a social and collaborative artistic mapping project that looks at the port ‘s transitional phases over a time period of 9 months.
A large-scale installation series loosely based on the various maps used by H.A. Gilligan in his “History of the Port of Dublin” is currently being created, and the works are displayed in the Terminal 1 Building in Dublin Port. Each month, a new map layer will be added to the installation.
Venue
Each month, a specific seminar, which is held in the LAB on Foley Street, in order ‘to bring the port back into the city’, accompanies a specific map layer.
“Dublin Port from 1947 to 1964/ Reconstruction” is the seventh seminar in this series. This time period was marked by the rebuilding of Custom House Quay West, No. 2 Graving Dock, No. 2 Ro-ro berth, and the quay superstructure of Ocean Pier took place, so now gas (besides the main fuels coal and oil) could be safely transported into Dublin. The construction of a whole Oil Zone took place, with the East Oil jetty and the West Oil jetty now being faced by a Pilot Shore Station in the heart of the Port.
A significant amount of reclaimed lands added to the port expansion. There were major changes on the Poolbeg Peninsula. The ESB experienced difficulty in obtaining coal supply for its old generating station at Pidgeon House, so they leased and converted an unused refinery boilerhouse to Ringsend No. 2 Station, which came into operation in 1955. A new wharf was constructed to enable tankers to discharge oil into the station’s storage tanks.
We hope that you are able to join us with the discussion of this particular era, where modernisation of equipment and electro-hydraulic design shaped a sort of brave new world port landscape. On a more natural note, the smell of the Liffey and various forms of ‘unsightliness’ were more in the public eye than ever, and environmental issues became prevalent. We will elaborate on the meanings of “reconstruction” in a postwar as well as in a contemporary context, and we will connect associations of progress and automation with machine aesthetics and the human body.
Speaker panel:
tba (Liebherr port technology)
Aoife Desmond (interdisciplinary artist)
Conor McGarrigle (artist and researcher)
Seminar Registration
This seminar is the seventh in a series of nine. The event is free, but places are limited. Please make sure to register by contacting Eventbrite here.
The Transit Gateway seminars are part of a wider public engagement programme for Port Perspectives 2017. They are funded by Dublin Port Company and the LAB Gallery.
Dublin Port's 2017 Port Perspectives / Engagement Programme has been developed in collaboration with Dublin City Council, Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane, UCD School of Architecture, National College of Art and Design, Irish Architecture Foundation, Create [the National Collaborative Arts Agency] and Business to Arts.
Dr Silvia Loeffler is an artist, researcher and educator in Visual Culture. She is the organiser of the Transit Gateway seminars, funded by Dublin Port Company, and run in close collaboration with the LAB. This seminar series will continue until October 2017 and is part of Silvia's artistic cartography 'Transit Gateway: A Deep Mapping of Dublin Port'.
For more about the work of Silvia click here in addition to a bio of each of the speakers click this link.