Remember 1690? Orange Halls and All That Jazz

Approximately 700 Orange Halls currently exist across the historic province of Ulster in Ireland. These traditional meeting places for the fraternal religious organisation known as the Orange Order are often contested spaces in post-conflict (Northern) Ireland. In a society that can no longer run on the ‘trusty’ binaries of the past, their gradual decline is symbolic of irreversible advances towards a more inclusive society. These halls can appear variously quaint, well-tended and accessible, vandalised and derelict, or fortress-like and impenetrable. While nature slowly reclaims some, others are being temporarily repurposed as shared community spaces, classrooms or childcare centres to attempt to secure their physical and financial survival.

6,000 miles away in Japan, over 500 jazz listening cafes (kissa) and bars dot the archipelago. Japanese jazz kissa culture originated in the eclectic coffee shops of the pre-war period and subsequently blossomed in the post-war years, rapidly becoming the epicentre of jazz listening culture in cities and towns across the country. Vital repositories of recorded jazz music and priceless audio equipment, they are spaces imbued with the individual tastes and idiosyncrasies of their owners. In their heyday of the 1960s and 70s, they were simultaneously places of education, sites for promotion of the ongoing evolution of jazz, and hubs of countercultural activity, but today they are rapidly vanishing forever from Japan’s musical landscape.

Using Heath’s definition of the vernacular as “of a place, of a people, by a people” (2003), both are vernacular examples of Foucault’s (1986) idea of the heterotopia – born as they from the culture to which they sit simultaneously in opposition. This visual paper uses images – from both my current research, I Am Where I Am Not, an autoethnographic investigation of my own Protestant identity through the architecture of Orange Halls, and from Tokyo Jazz Joints, my long term photographic document of Japan’s unique subculture of jazz kissa – to compare and contrast these disparate spaces, and show how as the realities of demographic and sociocultural change reshape society, they are material manifestations of dying vernacular cultures.