An Bothán: Framing Absence through Art, Memory and Erasure

Few architectures are as desolate, or as hauntingly absent as an bothán, a Fourth-Class dwelling that sheltered Ireland’s most impoverished during the Great Famine (An Gorta Mór, or the Great Hunger, 1845–1852). This research addresses that absence through a practice-based, creative–curatorial approach. It draws on archival fragments, oral histories, and art practice. The project reimagines an bothán not only as a fragile architectural form but also as a vessel of memory, holding histories of survival, loss, and care. This research extends broader debates on absence in cultural memory, situating the bothán within an art-historical discourse attentive to erasure, trauma, and fragile architectures. The paper opens with A Multicultural Vocabulary of Landscape: An Bothán (Fig.1) , a prose piece that distils the layered meanings of the dwelling, less a physical shelter than a symbolic space of endurance and deprivation. Through spare, historically grounded language, it evokes an bothán’s contradictions: a home and a coffin, a site of care and of profound neglect. This piece became the project’s point of departure, initiating the dialogue between archive, speculation, artefact, and exhibition explored here.