Rundale

by Kathleen Stokes

You will likely have made collages at some point in your life. It is a democratic method of creating that doesn’t require years or training and can happen with whatever materials you have to hand.

Collaging is centred around the process rather than the outcome. You start with whatever materials you have, spend time getting to know and play around them, before deciding to how bring them together to create something new.

Collage is often equated with reassembly, but repurposing is important too. The images used tend to come from materials acquired for other purposes (mostly newspapers here), only to be cut and torn up once initially consumed or no longer deemed of value. Anyone sitting with a selection of seemingly incongruous images and slogans, their dual meanings, juxtapositions, will find that their contradictions emerge almost intuitively.

We’ve chosen this as our first collage for a few reasons. First, Rundale is quite simply ‘new to the market’ insofar as it exists as a new media platform. Hello and welcome. We hope you find Rundale enjoyable and interesting.

This collage also plays around with the daily bombardment of marketing for leisure and consumption, despite widespread recognition that unequal patterns of global consumption must be redistributed and reduced.

In a profit-seeking world so hungry for more, we wonder if the process and principles of collage can serve as an invitation to reimagine our current modes of production and consumption, and seek value in what already exists.

In this first issue of Rundale, Patrick Bresnihan contextualises farmer-based, regressive populist movements and calls for amplifying and growing alternative, progressive rural-urban political platforms.

Maedhbh Nic Lochlainn critiques the touristification of Dublin City, and its economic, social, and environmental impacts.

V’cenza Cirefice offers a collaborative counter-mapping of the Sperrins, which challenges the extractive gaze of industry and the state.

And Fiadh Tubridy reviews Wild Geese, the first novel of Irish author Soula Emmanuel.