Regina José Galindo, Tierra, 2013. Colour video, with sound, 33 min, 30 sec. Installation view, University Gallery, University of Galway, TULCA Festival, Galway. Photo: Ros Kavanagh.
The Salvage Agency: TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
This year’s festival, which explored the role of art in contemporary ecology and environmental action, ranged from the most traditional of crafts to speculative contemporary performances.
Various venues, Galway
1–17 November 2024
by Bronac Ferran
Galway, in the far west of Ireland, hosts the annual TULCA festival of visual arts, which this year celebrated its 23rd iteration. Every year an invited Irish guest curator is encouraged to bring something fresh to the context, and this year the curator was Michele Horrigan, one of the most thoughtful of Ireland’s newer generation of contemporary art curators. The director of Askeaton Contemporary Arts, in County Limerick, Horrigan is also an artist whose practice engages with the lived consequences, including related environmental and social degradation, of global extractivist processes. Aspects of this theme found their way into the TULCA 24 programme, while her curatorial topic – The Salvage Agency – allowed for a broader series of interpretations.
I headed to Galway for a weekend during the festival, intrigued to see what Horrigan and the TULCA team, under its producer David Finn, had inserted among the existing cultural and historical narratives of a context in which the layering of the past already finds multiple manifestations in architectural and public spaces, not least around the network of interlacing streets that form the medieval heart of the city. Galway is also the gateway to the wonders of Connemara, a place of stone and steep cliff edges plunging to the Atlantic.
Lily Van Oost. Installation view, Galway Arts Centre, TULCA Festival, Galway. Photo: Bronac Ferran.
Launched along with the festival was a publication edited by Horrigan that expands on The Salvage Agency theme in a kaleidoscopic fashion. In an introduction by Horrigan, she refers to “the agency and role of art in contemporary ecology and environmental action. Galway, on the edge of the north-east Atlantic is a unique location for a heightened awareness of what is at stake. Explorations of landscape, seascape and nature, public space, colonial history, political structures, the industrial complex and folk narratives are all pertinent … I have seen art continually create, in its undercurrent of improvisation and frugality, new social perspectives … The pretence of The Salvage Agency is a straightforward one – from the wreckage we’ve made, can art nourish a new reality?”
The affirmative nature of this question infiltrated various strands of the programme. Works by more than 20 artists were included. Some were selected by open call, others were commissioned. Some were Irish-related pieces, made over the last five decades, being re-envisioned for this context.
Horrigan told me that, conceptually, she was keen to allow art to “seep into other spaces”, beyond what she felt could be the “architectural austerity” of contemporary gallery spaces, that might be off-putting in terms of inviting a wider public to visit. The programme duly included talks, workshops, a performance-based bus excursion and an international gathering on art, activism and the environment. The University of Galway opened some of its museum collections and other sites to contemporary art interventions. In a city in which students make up a large percentage of the population, this extended the festival’s reach.
I went on foot (forsaking GPS) to see everything: from The Printworks contemporary art space to a fishing-tackle shop; from a site of medieval archaeological heritage to the university’s geology, marine biology and zoology museums; from the stylish Pálás film theatre to the tourist office; from an off-centre, artist-run venue to the city’s museum and its arts centre; from a hallowed academic quadrangle to a picturesque riverside walkway. In finding my way from one to another, I got a clear sense of how precise the curatorial cut by Horrigan was, into the existing social and cultural ecology of the city, so that the programme radiated out at various angles, as if it had grown out of the habitat rather than being imposed on it.
Seanie Barron's stick sculptures hanging in Freeney's Fishing Tackle shop. Installation view, TULCA Festival, Galway. Photo: Bronac Ferran.
I started by joining a public walk exploring Galway’s industrial heritage. An age-diverse group gathered outside the museum and tourist office. Guided by a skilled local storyteller/historian, we headed down to the deep River Corrib, a historically important strategic route to the nearby Atlantic Ocean, not least under Ireland’s 800 years of political and military occupation by British interests from the 12th century onwards. It is a notoriously fast-flowing and voluminous river, conveying a sense of transience and temporality as well as patterns of recurrence. Indeed, later in the day in the fishing-tackle shop in the high street, where I went to see works by Seanie Barron, I was told that if I returned to the Corrib in the early spring, I would see hordes of salmon heading back to spawn upstream.
While much of the architectural history of a flow of material goods and people between other parts of Europe and this western seaboard has now disappeared, a few remnants are still standing. These became points of historical significance in the story the guide told us of the binding together of colonising, commercial, industrial and cultural forces within this location. We followed him along a path, below which a range of water management systems are entangled, devised by Victorian engineers, to support the then growing industrial development of this area. A large building across the river, we were told, was once one of the world’s leading whisky distilleries, owned by the family of Lady Gregory, playwright and primary patron of the Abbey Theatre and WB Yeats. Used by Galway International Festival to host Luke Jerram’s Mars project, plans are underway for its regeneration as a permanent venue. Along the same path, in a state of some disrepair, we saw a little bridge, named after Nora Barnacle, who lived in a nearby house before heading to Dublin and later meeting James Joyce, with whom she moved to Europe.
Street Protest, 15 November 2024, Galway. Photo: Bronac Ferran.
As we went by the main road, I saw a man hanging notices on posts. Unsure as to whether or not they were art, I took some pictures. On my way back, only a few minutes later, I saw they had been removed. One had said: RESTORE AUTONOMY OF BODY AND MIND; the second: END CENTRAL FALSE REALITIES, Restore the Right to Sane Perception, Actual Reality and Truth of Information. The third: BAN CENTRAL ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE [etc]. All were headed THE HUMAN NETWORK. Given this transience, I concluded they were external to the festival (though in several ways relevant).
Next, I went to the Galway tourist office, where John Carson’s 1974 work I’d Walk from Cork to Larne to See the Forty Shades of Green had been installed. For those not in the know, it probably seemed at first glance like a vintage tourist travel poster, the sort now in vogue. But it was a bit more radical than that when it was made. Carson, a Belfast-born artist now based in Pittsburgh in the US, walked from the city of Cork, deep in Ireland’s south, to Larne in the north over a fortnight in 1974. On his way, he took photographs of the colour green wherever it caught his eye, including a variety of fields in the south and the outfits of British soldiers north of the border.
John Carson's I'd Walk From Cork to Larne To See The Forty Shades of Green. Installation view, Galway Tourist Office, TULCA Festival. Photo: Bronac Ferran.
For anyone interested in Northern Irish performance art made during the period when the Troubles was at its worst, Carson’s works of the 1970s and 80s are seminal. He was part of a small, but highly formative group of artists who did stuff on the ground in Ulster at a time when hardly anyone from elsewhere, other than journalists, would visit. Crossing various media channels together, often mediated through the spoken word with his own harnessing of a Belfast vernacular, Carson pushed the boundaries of what was considered to be art, building bridges with popular culture. As part of their important work of investigation and reclamation of not yet fully documented aspects of Irish cultural history, within an international context, Askeaton Contemporary Arts produced the first substantial monograph on Carson in 2021.
It has been active, too, in stimulating deeper awareness of a radically feminist, ecologically engaged, Belgian-born artist named Lily van Oost (1932-97), who settled in the relatively isolated Black Valley in County Kerry in the 70s. A talented visual artist in various media, Van Oost opted from that point to use found and natural materials, within what was viewed as a polemical, quasi-outsider practice. However, as befits this period of reassessment of pioneering activist figures from the later decades of the last century, she has been receiving increasing posthumous acclaim among a younger generation of Irish artists.
Lily Van Oost. Installation view, Galway Arts Centre, TULCA Festival, Galway. Photo: Bronac Ferran.
In the accompanying publication, Van Oost’s grounded practice is described as “evoking the intrinsic relationship between feminism, inhabitation and nature, weaving her own wool to make wall hangings and clothing”. As the informative exhibition at Galway Arts Centre showed, she began making animist textures with wool before shifting to working with nylon tights. A selection of what she produced was shown, with the aid of digitally restored, former analogue slides that form part of Ireland’s Women Artists Action Group, and a rather poetic film about her life and work, made by Michael Holly and Mieke Vanmechelefilm about her life and work, made by Michael Holly and Mieke Vanmechelen. On the wall, seeming like a spectral reclamation of Van Oost’s spirit in her later days, was a materially degraded, personally expressive work by the artist, recovered last year from a garage in Killarney, loaned by its owner Brian Bowler for this exhibition. It is suspected it might have given by the artist in exchange for repairs to her car.
We learned, too, from a process of reconstruction in the film, aided by Grace Wells, a poet and artist who stayed with and interviewed Van Oost during the 90s and who has loaned archival materials for this exhibition, that the sensibility that led to Van Oost finding a space of artistic refuge in Kerry, where she also developed a significant garden, was shaped by her dark early childhood experiences in Belgium. Van Oost became an Irish citizen in 1985. The sensitive mediation of her story within the context of a programme themed around the topic of The Salvage Agency became, in turn, exemplary of the timeliness of this curatorial concept.
That became manifest also on several levels in the group show (of works by nine artists) at The Printworks gallery, where Barron, whose practice is entirely based on found, natural and otherwise often overlooked materials, and who was first brought to cultural attention by Horrigan and Lynch, got pride of place. He works with sticks, in effect, that he finds in the habitat around where he lives in Askeaton, unearthing and untangling them from their deep roots, or picking them up around the Shannon estuary, then refining them in his own way, while retaining the specificity of their character. The artefacts he creates are described either as walking sticks (sometimes with the addition of other dimensions such as deer horns for handles), or as “priests”, the vernacular name for bits of wood used in fishing to hit the catch over the head.
An award-winning film about Barron (also by Holly) was on display. This brought us on a memorable walk along a disused railway line with Barron, who drew us into the living experience of his reality of finding things that might be transformed by him into works by a blending of organic happenstance and rummaging in the undergrowth. Shot with care, the film reveals Barron’s articulate simplicity and directness that stands on its own, needing no explanation. Meanwhile, the chance to see some of his sticks in a context closer to their origins, seamlessly displayed among the plurality of paraphernalia in Freeneys fishing tackle shop in the nearby high street, remains one of the highlights of my visit.
Catriona Leahy, Bog Thing*: Assembly* for the Symbiocene. Installation view, Printworks, TULCA Festival, Galway. Photo: Ros Kavanagh.
At The Printworks, I was also taken by a series of visually compelling 3D animated scans, made by artist Catriona Leahy, of the surfaces of Irish bogland areas from which peat had been extracted by mechanical forces over recent decades. These form part of a continuing investigation by Leahy into the effects of what the publication describes as “state-sponsored strip-mining – or ‘peat-harvesting’”, which has recently been stopped after growing public criticism of the degradation of the land within the midlands of the country in particular. Leahy takes a conceptually regenerative approach, reimagining the residual earth as a space where the human regime of occupancy and misuse can be challenged by turning this ravaged bogland into a site of positive reclamation. She calls the work Bog Thing*:Assembly* for the Symbiocene, with reference in the associated commentary to how she “has come to think of the bog as a ‘huge archive, a repository of memory’, which ‘harbours a lot of mythologies, and histories, and traumas of our own colonial past and the tensions that arise out of this’”.
There was a strong resonance here with two short films shown as part of a sequence of four selected by Horrigan. One, Whale Fall (2023) by Patrick Hough with a script by Owen Corrigan, is set in an Irish midlands bogland and is a funny, futuristic-style account of how two women – one older, one younger – come into fierce collision about the fate of a beached whale that has (somehow) ended up in this location. The most powerful expression in the film is through the single eye of the whale, that glowers at them, as if everything to do with the world’s survival depends on their decision. The other film, Super Gairdín (Super Garden, 2022), made by Michelle Doyle and Cóilín O’Connell, is a brilliantly dystopian, well-acted, tale, in Irish Gaeilge, of how a none-too-convincing employee of an enormous, homogenising, mass-market garden centre, gets terrorised by the seemingly mythic, but here all-too-real Hag of Béara. The effects and pacing are so expertly achieved that by the final frame of the film I felt as I was being thrown around into a different reality.
Meanwhile, at the University of Galway, founded in 1845 by Queen Victoria, there was a series of artistic interventions by contemporary artists. The most visible was an installation by Stephen Brandes in the university’s quadrangle. This, in contrast to the subtle and minimalist aspect of other works encountered in other spaces, was designed at a scale, and located in a position impossible to miss.
Stephen Brandes, The Night Garden, 2024. Freestanding billboard, installation view, The Quadrangle, University of Galway, TULCA Festival, Galway. Photo: Bronac Ferran.
Brandes is known for often fresh, oblique and witty meshes of fictional and factual references. In The Salvage Agency publication, we learn that Brandes, on a speculative visit to the university, came across “an architectural sculpture” displaced from its original context, “placed, innocuously, despite its scale on a small access road”. This inspired him to interfere with the sculpture’s symbolism, which was associated directly with the British monarchy, featuring a lion, unicorn and ornamental shield, synonymous with the Royal Coat of Arms. It had been part of the portico of the Galway Courthouse, until removed (for its protection) during the 1919-21 war of independence in Ireland and relocated to the university for safekeeping.
Brandes took these various elements and rendered them into a new graphic composite, within which some taxidermy animals were added to the other emblems. Looking deliberately out of place within what he calls a “hallowed” context, Brandes’ ensuing sculpture makes us question what it is we are seeing. Blurring the lines between fiction and reality, it prompts us to question whether the original source still exists. And if so, how might we find the edge of the access road in which it is apparently located? Brandes is playing here with the ambivalence implicit in the concept of salvage that also carries with it a strong association with junk.
Back at The Printworks gallery, I saw various other works by Irish-based contemporary artists, including Remnants, by David Beattie, using ChatGPT. This related a fable about an ancient tree via headphones, while a touchscreen to the left invited interaction. The idea was simple but nicely executed. The screen had a 3D scan of an ancient stone circle that responded to haptic gesture; once shuffled around, the oral soundtrack also shifted and scrambled through various degrees from linear order to linguistic disorder.
David Beattie, Tokens, 2024. Installation view, The Hall of the Red Earl, TULCA Festival, Galway. Photo: Bronac Ferran.
Beattie contributed four pieces in total to TULCA 2024. I particularly enjoyed the work installed in Druid Lane, in the middle of the city centre, where his minimalist aesthetic finds an interesting context in terms of intervening in the archaeological ruins of the Hall of the Red Earl, a venue used in the middle ages by Richard de Burgh, second Earl of Ulster, to collect taxes from townspeople. What was appealing about how the work was curated here was that visitors were left alone to find it rather than being guided directly.
This meant, at least in my case, that I combed through all the texts and historical maps around the walls of this freely accessible site, to see if somehow the work might be hidden or encoded within these. I also studied the wall cabinets, which hosted an array of unearthed artefacts and objects, such as inscribed gold rings, fragments of pottery and the tiny bones of baby pigs. In developing the work for this site, Beattie read deeply into its history from the 13th century to the present, discovering that it had become a smelting house for iron in the 16th and 17th centuries. This stimulated him conceptually to make the series of small steel spheres that were visible, when one looked closely in the right direction, in gaps on the ground among the fragments of stone ruins.
David Beattie, Tokens, 2024. Installation view, The Hall of the Red Earl, TULCA Festival, Galway. Photo: Ros Kavanagh.
Beyond their smooth and rounded surfaces, these spheres carried a deeper meaning. Beattie made them, as he describes in The Salvage Agency book, by smelting and extracting precious metals from the catalytic converters of cars. He observed: “In a constant state of becoming something else, these minerals highlight the commodification of natural resources, and the environmental impact of mineral extraction.” This drew attention to the continuity of cycles of extractive human behaviours and how these are entangled with the machinery of power and influence.
Regina Jose Galindo, Tierra, 2013. Colour video, with sound, 33 min, 30 sec. Installation view, University Gallery, University of Galway, TULCA Festival, Galway. Photo Ros Kavanagh.
A looming sense of machine-powered evisceration of a biodiverse landscape hangs over the Guatemalan artist Regina José Galindo’s spellbinding, terror-invoking Tierra (2013). It was shown in a perfectly dark, silent, university gallery space – the optimum context within which to focus full attention on a work that concentrates intensely on time and space down into one locality. The artist stands, small and naked, alone in a field. A large, earthmoving excavator advances remorselessly towards her, destroying the top layers of soil around her. The work is a perfect embodiment of precarity and resilience. Soon the ground on which she is standing is reduced to a small island of soil and grass. In the seconds before its close, the video acquires a quasi-cubist aspect: we see many things simultaneously, as nothing (as ever in the domain of ecologically engaged art) is resolved; everything remains suspended at a point of mutual disclosure between past action and future contingency. A sense of a yawning violation of the space around Galindo is brilliantly communicated. I started to hope against hope that the worst did not happen. Galindo’s extreme performance hence becomes a salvaging of hope from the jaws of disaster.
Séan Lynch (left), in dialogue with Peter Fend at Printworks. Photo: Bronac Ferran.
I was present, too, for a talk at the Printworks space by Peter Fend, a US-born, long-term propagandist for art as a counteragency to corporate powers of global resource (mis)management. The talk accompanied a display of print materials and a documentary film made by Finn van Gelderen during a period Fend spent in Dublin in 2003, working on a public art project about wastewater in the city and arguing that deriving methane gas from seaweed might become a viable alternative to the use of oil. With the documentary film running directly behind him, we could see the juxtaposition of his figure as captured on camera in 2003 and his current persona, as he stood up to answer questions from his conversant, Séan Lynch. This had the effect of layering, where the images from 2003 disrupted our close listening to what he was saying about the present, which was made more difficult by his rapid-fire mode of articulation, combined with a performative raising of his arms to show us items in newspapers that were too small for us to read at a distance.
Fend advanced the speculative suggestion that Ireland might become a closer partner with India, as a strategic move that would allow, in his vision, a radically different approach to policy around dwelling near water sources and to exploiting together the promise of coastal seaweed to create ecologically beneficial biomass. Fend’s Ocean Earth Development Corporation, founded as a collaborative venture with some of his closest associates in the 80s, was conceived as a sort of travelling, polemical agency, creating confrontations in the terrain of art, power and the planet. His diagrammatic text- and image-based printed materials, which redraw maps and collage and fragment and recombine spatial geographical relations, drawing on policy documents and press materials, fit within a media art practice. They are now attracting growing interest within international visual art gallery contexts. While he has provoked wild scepticism in the past for many of his more outlandish ideas, might the time be coming for recognition that not everything in Fend’s conceptual laboratory is off the planet? Certainly, although performative, Fend is deadly serious about his ideas.
With its critically topical theme, and its willingness to range from the most traditional of crafts to speculative and contemporary performances, TULCA 2024 reinforced a sense of fostering and valuing individual artists while at the same time creating situations within which what they are making and producing finds a sense of societal connection. That a successful visual arts festival depended on a felt and genuine ecology of relations among its participants – whether local or visiting – became my primary takeaway from this event, which has left me feeling strongly like a Connemara salmon, looking forward to a return visit.
Bronac Ferran | Studio International | 06/12/2024