Drawing Extimacy: Representing the Emotional Affects of Northern Ireland’s Anti-violence Adverts

Prior to the signing of the Belfast Agreement in 1998, the last decade of the ethno-national conflict in Northern Ireland saw the Northern Ireland Office produce a series of hard-hitting adverts for Northern Irish television. The adverts were designed to change societal attitudes towards the conflict, largely through staged scenes of graphic violence intended to shock members of paramilitary groups from both sides of the political divide into stopping the bloodshed. A range of techniques were employed by producers to appeal to the public that sometimes bordered on clichéd representations of the violence. Despite the ambiguity of their effectiveness in changing hearts and minds in the country, the adverts had a resounding emotional impact through their use of relatable imagery, as evidenced in their depictions of lives destroyed by the violence. This research employs drawing as an autoethnographic survey of those adverts in order to reveal their affective qualities. Using pencil and tracing paper over still frames taken from the adverts, drawing is used to make connections between the author’s lived experience and to wider events that took place in the country at the time. The work employs Jaques Lacan’s theory of Extimacy to the conventions of the architectural section drawing, and seeks to show how another way of producing such a drawing might be achieved–one that recognises the mixing of both interior and exterior worlds of the drawer. In essence the project gives visual acknowledgement to the continued affective dimensions of these adverts, and in doing so attempts to transcend debates on their effectiveness at stopping the violence.