Art and emplacement in Northern Ireland

We explore the relationship between placeways and public art in the case of ephemeral architecture entitled “Temple,” installed in Northern Ireland in 2015. Synthesizing our own published ethnographies of the event, we employ a method we call auto-meta-ethnography to discover a grounded theory of emplacement that synergizes prior work undertaken on the concept of -scapes. We emphasize conjuncture over disjuncture and probe the isomorphism of cultural flows. We examine the imbrication of the installation in a cluster of -scapes we label landscape, mythscape, brandscape, giftscape, griefscape, artscape, and Templescape, together which comprise a chorography of the Temple’s emplacement. These micrometaphors provide more precision and nuance to existing macrometaphors, illuminate the intimate intermingling of -scapes, and illustrate the synergy their propinquity occasions.