Ihlara McIndoe.

Abstract
(Full article published in Glissando Magazine Fall 2023 edition – details below)
In his 2010 text The Paradoxes of Political Art, Rancière employs the phrase “the labour of fiction”, referring to the artistic strategy of making visible the invisible.  Drawing on Rancière’s work, this paper considers a recent approach to music archival curation: the entirely fictional Aisteach archive of the Irish Avant-Garde.  Envisioned by Irish composer-performer Jennifer Walshe (b. 1974), Aisteach undertakes compositional and musicological labours of fiction to bring new life to the past.  Aisteach writes into being a history where the Irish Dada flourished in the Guinness factories, and drone music began when an uilleann piper experimented with only using the pipe regulators, among other fictions.  Through the exploration of identity and politics in sound, Aisteach fosters a more inclusive and exploratory collective memory, and showcases living connections between the past, present, and future.  Casey (2019) has highlighted Aisteach’s significance in challenging dominant systems of heritagization.  Building on this argument, my paper analyzes how Aisteach’s modes of (re)thinking, (re)making and remembering serve as a model for decolonial practices.  I consider what benefits a similar project might offer in other post-colonial environments, such as Aotearoa.  As identified by Basinée (2007), music commissioning policies in Aotearoa traditionally prioritize projects which present consensual values of a utopian united nation, therefore instrumentalizing cultural practices to augment representations of reality.  Would the curation of a fictional archive, similar to Aisteach, make more visible those creators (and their creations) who do not espouse nationalized arts policy, and offer a structural path towards voicing Aotearoa’s artistic diversity?