Aisteach: Jennifer Walshe, Heritage, and the Invention of the Irish Avant-Garde

Recent debates in heritage and archive studies have centred around the question of intangibility and how best to faithfully conserve and document dynamic cultural practices. This article explores the way in which composer Jennifer Walshe’s project Aisteach, a fictional archive of the Irish avant-garde, interrogates questions of authenticity, exoticisation, commodification, misrepresentation and marginalisation in heritage discourse, both tangible and intangible. Drawing upon art theory, philosophy, heritage and archive studies, it is argued that by contesting the binary underpinning of evaluative cultural heritage discourse, Aisteach instead advances a form of cultural production occupying a liminal space between inclusion and exclusion, past and present, fact and fiction.