Perforum Season Autumn 2022

20 Sep 2022

Wed 28th Sept, 2.15pm @ Granary Theatre:      Róisín O'Gorman / Attuning to archival affects through arts practice research

Wed 19th Oct, 2.15pm @ Granary Theatre:          Jody O'Neill / Advocacy Through Art

Wed 9th Nov, 2.15pm @ Granary Theatre:        Jools Gilson / Tempestries: The Cloonshannagh Bog Body & Textiles

Wed 14^th Dec, 2.15pm @ Granary Theatre:          Doireann O’Malley /Conversations On A Crosstown Algorithm

Róisín O'Gorman / Attuning to archival affects through arts practice research

Wed 28th Sept, 2.15pm @ Granary Theatre:       

Attuning to archival affects through arts practice research sentation elaborates on two on-going collaborative projects where performance based practices encounter and respond to a range of fragments, remains, absences and traces within UCC’s archive and it knowledge networks.  Both projects have followed trajectories developed during the Wellcome Funded Living Well with the Dead in Contemporary Ireland (https://livingwithdead.wixsite.com/website). The first, Terminal Morraine began in collaboration with media based artist Michael Murphy with performer Roksana Niewadzisz. The initial iteration of this project was a four-channel audio/video installation shown in Montana 2021 and 2022. It began in 2020 in Ireland, interweaving O’Gorman’s somatic movement work alongside research on the legacies of state supported systems of incarceration under the guise of care. Collaborating video artist Murphy created a visual framework to push modes of representing unspeakable histories. The formal premise is that new possibilities and understandings emerge by colliding texts and images together, dislodging their intended control systems and allowing the audience to access meanings that come out of this disruption. The project creates an immersive event where disruption collapses distances between histories and places feeling towards new kinds of connections which are jolting and and incomplete which resist official narratives that would numb us into forgetting.  

The second project offers further space to analyse creative research methods within an on-going collaborative medical humanities project investigating an archival trove of medical wax moulds which were made at the end of the 19^th century.  These remains flicker across representational, ethical, and performative epistemologies as they were cast from very particular bodies of the socially disenfranchised, those suffering advanced stages of disease (most often syphilis). Individuals’ body parts were cast with plaster, from which wax moulds were made (moulages) and these circulated to medical schools across the West. The moulds were offered as an effective technology for rendering pathologies in specific detail and they are readily celebrated as artefacts which contributed to the establishment of the field of dermatology.  Our project seeks to find other ways to engage with the legacies and performative webs these objects offer to our social and medical imaginaries.  

With these projects as examples, this presentation allows us to reflect on and discuss the possibilities and particularities of arts based research where the modes of embodied, affective inquiry come to the fore and both challenge and extend existing epistemologies (based primarily on discursive practices and controls). Performance imaginaries and embodied practices offer other modes of engagement and response which dream with the archive and its absences. In dialogue with material and posthuman feminist scholarship, we can consider together the ways in which we make and circulate knowledge within our education systems and embodied experiences. 

Jody O'Neill / Advocacy Through Art

Wed 19th Oct / 2.15pm @  Granary Theatre:        

A conversation and sharing of work with Jody O'Neill.

Jody is an award-winning autistic writer and performer. Her work has a strong focus on disability advocacy and social inclusion. She is currently Theatre Artist in Residence at UCC and Cork Opera House, and is a 2022 recipient of the Markievicz Award.

As part of this event, she will share some video clips from her play, What I (Don't) Know About Autism, read from work in development and engage in conversation about current projects, as well as her artistic and personal journey over the past five years, which led to a significant shift in her practice.

Jools Gilson / Tempestries: The Cloonshannagh Bog Body, Textiles & Somatic Research

Wed 9th Nov, 2.15pm @ Granary Theatre:        

This performance presentation will focus on the 2021 Fulbright research / current project in development Tempestries. This artistic research project is focussed on the ways somatic movement and textiles shape a sense of place within an Irish context. Interweaving attuned embodied practices, textile art, choreography, environmental science and creative writing the project explores the Irish peatland bog as theme and metaphor, with a particular focus on a 7^th Century bog body and her textiles discovered in Cloonshannagh Bog, Co. Roscommon in 2005. Initial R&D for this project was developed during a residency in the Atlas Institute at the B2 Center for Media, Art & Performance at Colorado University Boulder. Working closely with Inside the Greenhouse the Center for Creative Climate Communication and Behaviour Change (C3BC) and the Unstable Design Lab this Artistic Research used somatic practices as methodology in the dance studio as well as in writing and textile / film making.

Doireann O’Malley / Conversations On A Crosstown Algorithm

Wed 14^th Dec / 2.15pm @ Granary Theatre:                       

Artist:
Doireann O’Malley
Featuring Juan Carlos Cuarado & Mathea Hoffmann, 3D by Bertrand Flanet, and sound design by Caroline McCarthy.
 
Conversations On A Crosstown Algorithm by Doireann O’Malley is a new co-commission by National Sculpture Factory and Berlin Program for Artists, The Berlin Artistic Research Program and supported by the Arts Council of Ireland and presented in association with Cork Midsummer Festival which will now be presented in October 2022.
 
This will be the Irish Premiere of this new work by Doireann O’Malley.
Conversations On A Crosstown Algorithm is an immersive CGI video installation exploring new forms of queer subjectivity and their entanglements with data economy, artificial intelligence, identity politics - this post human fiction probes us to reconsider the relationship between nature and technology at a time of simultaneous crises. Set within the visions and memories of a diverse group of queer people who find themselves trapped in a virtual environment, where they are trying to regain the pre-colonial, pre-capitalist lost memories and rituals while simultaneously trying to awaken their frozen comrades who are trapped within the glitches of human behavioral dysfunction.

For more on this story contact:

Theatre@ucc.ie