#NONARNIA

performance East Belfast 2016 : Wardrobe, Mirror, Sign, Street, pulling action. 
‘We all wish we could be transported to some magical land of possibilities at sometime in our lives’ anon

#nonarnia is a humorous public, social media and performance event that takes its premise from the literature of C.S. Lewis’s 1950 children’s series ‘The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe’.

Visual Artist Paul Moore invites you to take up the pilgrimage and step through the portal to discover what you might of been or where you might have gone.

This Belfast-focused project critiques the adoption of fantastic cultural icons as signifiers of the gentrification processes.

Moore has been producing different works in response to C.S. Lewis’s 1950’s children’s book, The Lion the Witch and The Wardrobe. Each of the individual works has its own unique qualities and relationship with East Belfast and its community, working as individual pieces and together in a series as larger body of work.

“Furniture can often be overlooked as a mundane feature of the home. But its resonance in our lives is much more profound. Cupboards, for example, contain our past – as well as our regrets and secrets. Our wardrobes, meanwhile, suggest who we might have become, and where we might have gone.”

The performances investigate how our individual and local identity is affected by global financial and political landscapes. It poses questions on how these institutional modes and attitudes to space, culture and the body apply to our own locality and sense of place.

The work draws awareness to local and individual identity and its history within the urban environment which has been politically and religiously oppressed throughout its history. East Belfast is now undergoing a process of gentrification in public spaces based on local icons such as the development of C.S Lewis Square, and using themes from the Narnia Chronicles they echo and subvert the political and religious rhetoric of the area.

‘It is very foolish to shut one-self into any wardrobe. ‘―C.S. Lewis.




Paul Moore 2016
Mark