The World Was All Before Them
Curated by Clare Gormley
4 - 20 November 2022
Galway, Ireland

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts is delighted to share the public outcomes and online documentation of its 2022 programme, The World Was All Before Them curated by Clare Gormley.

Contributors to The World Was All Before Them are artists, filmmakers, writers and poets: Anouk Kruithof, Becca Albee, Berte & Harmey, Caroline Jane Harris, Chloe Cooper, Christopher Steenson, Elise Rasmussen, Emily Speed, Esmeralda Conde Ruiz, Judith Dean, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Michael Hanna, Nicoline van Harskamp, Quentin Lacombe, Tabitha Soren, Tadhg Ó Cuirrín and The Lifeboat.

Constructed in a moment of global change, upheaval and uncertainty, TULCA 2022 addresses the notion of futurity and asks what the political potentials might be in imagining new futures and envisioning new ways of being in this world.

Taking its title from the final lines of John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, which recounts Adam and Eve’s journey out of Eden and into a new, unknown world, the festival seeks to take stock of our current moment and imagine what lies ahead, as we too find ourselves on a precipice: of ecological destruction, humanitarian crisis, mass migration, global pandemics, wars and technological over-saturation. Surely, there has never been such an urgent time to challenge the structures of our current existence, and to seek out visions of future worlds worth living in. 

Disrupting traditional western, capitalistic, theistic tendencies to imagine the future as either utopian or dystopian, the festival will instead conjure a vision of the future as inextricably tied to the world we live in now: its inequities, as well as its possibilities. As such, it is less invested in depicting the world we might create, than in questioning how it is we might make our existing world a more liveable place. 

The intention is to map a more expansive, non-binary, open-ended and fluid conception of what might lie ahead, through an engagement with a form of futurity rooted in a politics of livability, not escapism or mastery. 

By-passing and critiquing the notion that technology alone might save us, this edition of TULCA seeks out practices which engage, among other things; civics, alliances, poetics, politics, bodies, dance, movement, language, decoloniality, sociality, connectivity, collectively and the quotidian acts of everyday existence as among the tools of future world-making.

TULCA 2022 Programme

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
The World Was All Before Them
Curated by Clare Gormley
4 - 20 November 2022
Galway, Ireland