TULCA 2020: Offsite

Vukasin Nedeljkovic and Felispeaks

Poem: Felispeaks. Photograph: Vukašin Nedeljković, Great Western House, Galway (2013) from Asylum Archive.
Installation view in the Claddagh, photographed by David Finn and Boyd Challenger.

Vukašin Nedeljković’s Asylum Archive project was initiated in 2007 and focuses on Direct Provision and Emergency Accommodation Centres in Ireland. These centres are not housed in purpose-built architecture: more commonly they are located in former religious institutions (such as the Old Convent in Ballyhaunis, Co. Mayo), or in private hotels and B&Bs across the country. The vast majority of centres are managed on a for-profit basis by private contractors. Initiated when Nedeljković was living in a Direct Provision Centre himself, Asylum Archive aims to create an interactive online resource, critically foregrounding accounts of exile, displacement, trauma and memory. The project adopts the authoritative mode of documentary photography as an explicit form of evidence-gathering, continuing to render haunting institutional images with inhabitants out of view. For The Law is a White Dog, Nedeljković’s work was presented outdoors as a large billboard print for the first time, in Galway’s residential Claddagh area. The billboard incorporates an appeal by poet Felispeaks to end the Direct Provision system in Ireland, in lieu of a commercial advertisement.

Soft Fiction Projects

Usually or Infrequently Indecent or Obscene is a collaborative zine made by Soft Fiction Projects with young people aged 16+ involved in shOUT! and CAPE Youth Projects, Galway. It has been produced as a limited edition print (a folded leporello), and in a digital edition for the TULCA website. An extract of the project is installed in the window of Galway City Library during the second week of the festival run.

View the zine as an interactive pdf here.

Caroline Campbell (Loitering Theatre)

Protest Archive is an intergenerational feminist and activist project by Caroline Campbell (Loitering Theatre). This project has been developed with a loose affiliation of women across the island of Ireland who have been active in radical political protest from the 1960’s to today. Significantly, this archive of bodily gestures extends through feminist practice into modes of anti-imperialism and actions of solidarity far beyond the island where its bodies are located. Grey Eminence is a zoom workshop and guided performance developed for The Law is a White Dog that was the first activation of the Protest Archive. The workshop involved the first readings of texts from the Protest Archive. Working creatively with the disembodied aesthetics of Zoom, it also incorporated an exercise where participants directed Caroline Campbell’s actions, live, outside the US Embassy in Dublin on the day following the US presidential election. Contributors included poet and activist Sarah Clancy, and selected avatars in the internet ether. The event was moderated by Megs Morley.