EL PUTNAM REVIEWS TULCA FESTIVAL OF VISUAL ARTS.
This year’s TULCA Festival, curated by Michele Horrigan and titled The Salvage Agency, meets us in our current moment of global instability and uncertainty, mistrust and disillusion, extreme automation and military acceleration, when it can feel nearly impossible to claim any sense of agency. However, the festival assembles a selection of artists who collectively demonstrate a sense of purpose by salvaging the multiplicity of entangled crises and digging into the thickness of time.
A Salvage Agency
The festival title can be read in multiple ways, attesting to the nuance of its meaning. At first, The Salvage Agency sounds like some kind of service that rummages through scrap, in order to determine what can be kept, reused, or restored. One imagines the Baudelairean figure of the ragpicker, tasked with creating order from the hoarded debris of the industrial age.1 In a way, that is what each of the exhibiting artists is trying to do, as they take and make use of linguistic, cultural, or material fragments.
For example, Seanie Barron’s wood carvings present haptic and tacit knowledge of the materials he collects and transforms. Exhibited in the Printworks Gallery and installed among the displays at Freeney’s Fishing Tackle Shop, Barron’s carvings demonstrate a salvaging of spirit, which conjures surrealist visions from wood. Also at the Printworks, Áine Phillips’s sculptural installation and video work, The Secret (2013), depicts a road adjacent to the IKEA superstore in Dublin. Broken bits of furniture, packaging, and other rubbish are strewn along this secluded thoroughfare. There is nothing, it seems, to be salvaged within this detritus; it conceptually underscores both the empty promise of consumerism and the brevity of our material lives.
Regina José Galindo, Tierra, 2013, HD video; still courtesy of the artist and TULCA Festival.
However, the act of salvaging is not just about recovering physical materials, but a salvaging of humanity, within this milieu. In the University Gallery, Guatemalan artist and poet Regina José Galindo’s video work, Tierra (2013), presents the artist standing nude in a green field, as an earthmoving excavator digs the land around her. She maintains her posture of stillness, as she is eventually left on a small island of earth, in the midst of a decimated landscape. Sometimes, when overwhelmed by external forces – understood, in this instance, as patriarchal and colonial regimes – what is salvaged comes from within our bodies, as one is grounded to the Earth.
Léann Herlihy’s performance-based bus tour, Beyond Survival School Bus (2022), similarly engages interconnections between the body and the landscape. In contrast to Galindo, Herlihy is playful in their evaluation of the power of human relations with nature, delivering a script informed by queer ecology, feminist and abolitionist theory. However, both artists challenge notions of apocalypse as a future event; rather, they suggest, such moments have previously happened and are currently occurring, requiring urgent systematic and structural change.
Áine Phillips, The Secret, 2013, sculpture and video, installation view, Printworks Gallery; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artist and TULCA Festival.
The Agency of Salvage
While the festival title alludes to the agency that arises from acts of salvage, the capacity to recover is becoming less feasible amid the extractive practices of late capitalism. Bogland, for example, is a repository of time – both an ancient landscape and an organic, living archive. The industrial strip-mining of bogs for the mass cultivation of fuel during the twentieth century has left stretches of exhausted wasteland in the Irish midlands. In the Printworks Gallery, Catriona Leahy’s Bog Syntax: The (Dis)Order of Things* presents fragmented digital images of bogland, laid out as specimens in an irregular grid. There is a breaking down of visual forms, evocative of peat harvesting – whereby the earth is conceived in terms of its capacity to be exploited – to create a pixelated visual landscape. While salvage within a state of ruin may seem futile, anthropologist Anna Tsing states: “Our first step is to bring back curiousity.”2 Artistic interventions within the festival prompt the curiosity that is necessary to instigate liveliness. In Leahy’s Bog Thing*: Assembly* for Symbiocene, a 3D scan of an eviscerated landscape becomes an ampitheatre that actively invites such speculations.
Seanie Barron, wood carvings, installation view, Printworks Gallery, November 2024; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artist and TULCA Festival.
To Salvage Agency
Much like bogland, myths are tales that are carried through time, with the salvaging of these narratives opening new imaginary possibilities. David Beattie’s Remnants (2024) presents a 3D-scan of the Grange Stone Circle, a Bronze Age site in Limerick. The audio track, an AI- generated mythological narrative, is glitched and disrupted, and further manipulated through interactions with the screen. A subtle twist of the 3D object enables the voice to become more distinct, only to be swallowed by noise. The viewer assumes a god-like position, controlling the simulation and its broken algorithmic recounting of oral history across technological epochs.
In Michelle Doyle and Cóilín O’Connell’s Irish language short film, Super Gairdín (2022), screened at Palás Cinema, a middle-aged man inadvertently awakens a vengeful cailleach(divine hag) who has taken the form of a large rock within a garden centre. Mythology in this film does not function as a means of trying to capture a lost history, but the absurd scenario shows the cailleach encountering the limits of a past that cannot be translated into the present. These linguistic limitations do not hinder the capacity of the story to emerge, but resonate with Irish philosopher Richard Kearney’s reflections on mythology as a “catalyst of disruption and difference, a joker in the pack inviting us to free variations of meaning” in order to “challenge and transform the status quo.”3
Most striking about this year’s festival is Horrigan’s assemblage of artists, whose interrogations of landscape, nature, and folklore, as well as colonial and industrial histories, offer a range of aesthetic encounters. Moreover, this iteration of TULCA can also be understood as the ‘salvaging of agency’ in recovering, through artistic provocations and improvisations, our capacity to imagine and actively build alternative futures. The act of producing art itself, then, becomes a means of reclaiming agency, as we learn to exist through and with the wreckage that accumulates.
EL Putnam is an artist-philosopher based in Westmeath.
1 See for example Charles Baudelaire, Artificial Paradises (Les Paradis Artificiels, 1860), trans. Stacy Diamond (New York: Citadel Press, 1996).
2 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2021) p 6.
3 Richard Kearney, Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture, Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1997) p 98.