Dunkettle Mon Amour: the cultural topographies of Irish motorway interchanges

This paper examines the Dunkettle Interchange, the primary motorway junction at Cork city's eastern gateway, as a landscape that speak directly to the cultural conditions of late. modernity and the unresolved identities of contemporary Ireland. Despite its monumental scale and daily use by tens of thousands of commuters, the interchange remains epistemologically elusive, resisting categorisation as landscape, infrastructure or place. This resistance raises important questions about landscape representation and identity in contemporary Ireland, where such large-scale infrastructural developments often exist in tension with traditional notions of place and belonging. The paper argues that the interchange exemplifies a spatial assemblage of extraordinary technical complexity and social consequence, yet one that eludes traditional analytical frameworks. Constructed on reclaimed mudflats and composed of embankments, berms and band drains, the interchange functions as a geological intervention, a topographical transformation and a choreographic apparatus that produces differentiated mobilities while rendering certain subjects such as pedestrians and non-motorised travellers invisible.. The paper situates the interchange within broader debates on infrastructure, mobility and urban subjectivity. Against the backdrop of a public art commission seeking to install a landmark sculpture visible to 95,000 daily vehicles, the paper proposes that the interchange has already constituted itself as a work of art, not as an aesthetic object but as a dynamic, socially embedded spatial practice. The task is thus to attend to the site's existing discourses, its material operations, hydrological logics, labour histories and the conditions of urban arrival it both enables and constrains. In doing so, the paper contributes to discussions on infrastructural aesthetics, non-representational theory and the politics of urban thresholds, while also interrogating how such spaces trouble the myths and realities of life in Ireland.