Remember 1690? Creating a photographic (an)archive of Ulster’s Orange Halls.

Approximately 700 Orange Halls currently exist across the historic province of Ulster. These traditional meeting places for the fraternal religious organisation known as the Orange Order are often contested spaces in post-conflict (Northern) Ireland. Their gradual decline is at once symbolic of irreversible advances towards a more inclusive society, and – to those who maintain and protect them against the flow of secularisation and demographic change – a material expression of the importance of resisting change and ‘standing one’s ground’.

This visual paper uses images from my current research, 'I Am Where I Am Not', to explore these buildings photographically and autoethographically by both making them visible, and reimagining them as something else. Drawing on a methodology that incorporates Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, (an)archiving and creative nonfiction writing, I will present an emerging typology of the halls. In this 25th anniversary year of the Good Friday Agreement, as some halls are slowly forgotten and others remain fiercely guarded, new halls and extensions also continue to be built for this diminishing material culture. As such, Orange Halls are not only emblematic of the past and present, but also possible futures in a post-conflict society.