TULCA 2021: Open Call
TULCA Festival of Visual Arts is pleased to announce details of its 2021 Open Call curated by Eoin Dara; there’s nothing here but flesh and bone, there’s nothing more.
A short missive from the curator:
A chara,
I am writing to you from the east coast of Scotland, thinking about the west coast of Ireland — a place I have not been able to visit for quite some time. I have resisted writing this for weeks now, hoping (perhaps naively) that this delay would allow me to speak with some clarity about what a project such as TULCA might look like this Autumn in Galway. I have been worrying about how to state my intentions, how to lay out my table, how best to project an air of assured confidence and authority in this time of unwilling dormancy. The truth is though, in these circumstances, I don’t have a concise curatorial statement to make. My thoughts remain as unfixed as the world around us, and performing some kind of professional fiction here would be deceitful.
In the winter of 2019 I pitched an embryonic idea to the board at TULCA centring around a question posed within a poem by Ocean Vuong. The question was ‘Don’t we touch each other just to prove we are still here?’
I didn’t know that in a few short months physical intimacy would become an impossibility for so many of us. I didn’t know we would then collectively be entering a year devoid of touch. I shelved this idea for much of 2020, thinking it a little obvious, gauche even, to pursue such a focus after the pandemic. And yet here we are in 2021, still locked within it in a state of slow, unknowing ongoing. Still sheltering in place. Still seeking out new ways to enact intimacy, trying to affirm something like touch through its negation. Still trying to connect, to care, to love, to grieve, and to resist, when all the means of gathering that previously sustained us are (literally) out of reach.
So whilst we remain in this untethered place, far from any space of clarity or assurance, I am writing to say that I am still obsessively thinking about touch. Do we touch each other just to prove we’re still here? In what way? Where is here? Is here enough anymore? What do we want to touch again? What do we want to let go of? These are some of the questions I hope will guide my thinking in the coming months, with the help of other artists, writers and kindred spirits as part of TULCA 2021.
For now, this morning, I’m listening repeatedly to a song by George Michael advocating for casual sex in public spaces (I know you want to but you can’t say yes). I’m misremembering a line from a Jamaica Kincaid essay where she describes a fritillaria flower as smelling like the armpits of all the people you’ve ever loved. I’m thinking of a poem by Caspar Heinemann where he crafts an image of loving arms as ‘a small architecture of warm blood.’
Of course I’m thinking of all these things in an act of longing. I’m writing this hopeful missive from my own empty architecture, towards a place of fullness and imagined excess we might fill together in an inoculated future.
I need to draw this note to a close, as the skin around my thumb and forefinger has started bleeding with bright anxiety. Perhaps I’ll be able to stop this leakage by October. Perhaps not. Perhaps it is a good reminder of what moves through me and allows me to move through.
’til then, in solidarity, and with warm blood,
Eoin
TULCA 2021 Open Call
TULCA is curated through direct invitation and an Open Call process. The final selection of artworks will be based on thematic connection, artistic quality, and feasibility. Selections are made by the curator in consultation with the TULCA producer.
Full details on the Open Call Process & Guidelines can be found here.
TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
there’s nothing here but flesh and bone,
there’s nothing more
Curated by Eoin Dara
November 2021
Galway, Ireland
www.tulca.ie
Image: Isobel Neviazsky, Two Figures 2021. Graphite on paper. Courtesy the artist.