24.07.2025
The transition from Wexford, Waterford into Cork City along the quays, in and out of industrial areas toward the idyllic west brought a change of rhythm.
Cities develop towards circulation; transport, movement of people from place to place, and planning laws are usually closely monitored; architecture being valued as functional or culturally significant. The countryside on the other hand conforms to an ideal of pastoral farmlands or protected wildlife reserves. Both city and countryside are constructs but between the two, is a buffer zone that is largely unacknowledged, poorly planned, unsightly and often associated with waste management and criminal activity; ports, industrial areas, forgotten hinterlands, liminal zones…edgelands on the fringes of society.
An ignored and neglected terrain, they flourish with wildlife, providing an environment of unfettered growth for a wide variety of plants. Such environments exist on their own terms, and are not tended to according to our ideals of function, recreation, beauty etc. In a way the lawlessness associated with edgelands makes them more of a wilderness than the mountain tops, rocky coastlines or lush forests that you see as you travel west along the road. The mysterious quality of these places-their promise and potential for adventure as well as danger, the feeling of non-conformity that is abundant in such places, their ambiguity is all worth acknowledging and even celebrating.
The definition of weeds in the dictionary illustrates our limitations here, where we define flora and fauna according to perceived ideas of worth. Weeds, says the dictionary, are ‘a valueless plant growing wild, especially one that grows on cultivated ground to the exclusion or injury of the desired crop. Any undesirable or troublesome plant especially one that grows profusely where it is not wanted’.
Concrete, dumps, weeds, machinery, scrapyards, factories, wastelands…
Edgelands are the dovetail between tradition and modernity, rural and urban. For a materialist society based upon the widespread belief that ever-increasing production, consumption and profit are yardsticks for measuring the quality of human life, the particularity of subjective or embodied experience, of mythical thinking and the value of local knowledge are consistently undermined. Whole bodies of knowledge belonging to particular place and time; folklore, the mythical and the marginalia of the local are being destroyed.
For our pit stop in Ballydehob we got in touch with Vera and Taf, musicians, artists, educators and founders of BRRR Record and Tape Fair. Vera and Taf travel around with their extensive and brilliant vinyl collection, DJing and teaching people it's core fundamentals, causing club nights to spring up in their wake. Given that Vera and Taf always have their ear to the ground on local projects, we asked them if they knew of anyone in the area who would like to be part of tour de force for an interview, to share some music, art, knowledge, a good story. They got back to us suggesting Samuel Arnold Keane and together we arranged an evening of music and storytelling at Levis Corner House, Ballydehob, where Samuel joined us to share some songs en français. Having spent his childhood in Lyon, he’s interested in urban foraging, how we can reclaim small forgotten parts of the city, and perhaps discover a burgeoning biotope on the peri-urban fringe. Samuel is a self described wanderer who merges various art forms to tell stories of the seaweeds, coasts and streets as he gathers, wades and walks.
This day last year we interviewed Samuel in the Renault 4 with a live broadcast for our series K7 dans la 4L. You can watch the episode below. Much of the conversation centred on foraging. Samuel current research focus is the preservation of, and access to shorelines in west Cork where he shares his knowledge of seaweed in person with small self-published booklets of text and drawings that he often distributes during guided foraging tours.
