25.5 Hours on Whiddy Island
In July 2025, a group of artists, academics and activists gathered on Whiddy Island for a weekend to share ideas and research around the themes of antidefuturing and agonistic design. This was the first iteration of AGON, a summer school hosted by Robert Collins and Paul O’Neill.
Over two days, discussions ranged across subjects including the design of digital infrastructures, agency, the right to repair, civic spaces and speculative futures. Though not the focus of any one presentation, Whiddy’s complex history framed these discussions. The island was the site of a strategic military base for the British in the early 1800s, to protect Bantry Bay against invasion by the French, and later in the 1970s was the site of a major tragedy when an oil tanker exploded and cost 50 lives. The Whiddy oil refinery is still a major feature of the island, though its massive tanks sit sunk into the ground, hidden below the line of the land.
These infrastructural threads – the ruins of the military batteries on the east end of the island and on the west end the still-active oil refinery, which has experienced several changes of multinational ownership in recent years – frame a land mass which is otherwise broadly agricultural, a patchwork of green fields, cows, sheep and hedgerows.
25.5 Hours on Whiddy Island is an experimental audio essay that responds to the ideas explored at the summer school, in the context of Whiddy’s landscape, natural and built. Combining spoken text, field recordings and found sounds, the piece considers the tensions and resonances between natural ‘infrastructures’ and their human-made counterparts. What emerges is a deeper reflection on the question of physical agency in our environments – natural and human-made, physical and digital – and how this frames our political agency.
25.5 Hours on Whiddy Island is a collaboration between Eavan Aiken and Rachel Donnelly. It is due for radio broadcast in early 2026.