New Geneva: Tracing the Memories of a Forgotten Utopia is a research project engaging with the ruins of Ireland’s lost city, New Geneva. Planned in 1782 as a utopian settlement for exiled Swiss watchmakers, the project was never fully realised. Today, the site bears silent witness to a layered history, from early settler houses to its later transformation into a prison and military barracks.
Combining fieldwork, drawing, videography, and oral histories, our project reconstructs overlooked fragments into one spatial narrative. At its centre is a large-scale hand-drawn axonometric which maps 240 years of New Geneva, resisting linear time to unfold in an entangled cartography of ambitions, traumas, and absences.
Presented at Architecture at the Edge festival, the installation assembles a counter-archive of New Geneva, inviting audiences to reflect on how memory, absence, and fragmentary histories can be reactivated through spatial practice.
Fiachra McCarthy
Gjiltinë Isufi
Supported by:
Culture Moves Europe
Architecture At the Edge
The Drawing: 2.2m x 1.6m
Coloured pencils on canvas
