Propagate
3 - 18 October 2020
Propagate was a public programme of workshops and events, in the gallery, off-site and online, organised by Catalyst Arts. The facilitators included Nollaig Molloy, Niamh Seana Meehan, Suzanne Walsh, Kevin Breathnach and an evening of poetry by The Tangerine with poets Padraig Regan, Stephen Sexton and Zosia Kuczyńska.
Collaboration, writing and performance were the thematic seeds of this programme. This cross-disciplinary approach resulted in a unique sharing of knowledge, as the selected participants for the three workshops explored and played with these ideas, creating a platform for dissemination. The Propagate programme allowed for a creative exchange and cultivated new ways of working within an art practice.
Seeds were sown and ideas became rooted. Have a read of the Propagate Online Publication below.
This programme was supported by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and Art Fund.
Cite
Saturday 3 - Sunday 4 October 2020
Nollaig Molloy
Over a period of two days artist Nollaig Molloy, together with participants, explored practical and conceptual discussions about traditional, living and personal archives. While carrying out offsite and in-house activities, the group created an archive of a disused site within the locality of Catalyst Arts, Belfast; an area going through change within urban development and planning, effecting the arts and culture, heritage, housing, transport and social spaces.
With this in mind, participants collated artefacts, objects of interest and text-based discoveries while documenting the selected site through a range of mediums. In conversations it was discussed: What is an archive? Why is one object/document/photograph of value over another? How is an archive built? Who decides what is preserved? All the while thinking about the subjectivity of archival material, the care and haptics of its contents and the systems of researching and working with archives.
The collected materials was compiled and the group collaborated to create a zine-style publication which has been added to the Catalyst Arts’ archive.
I seem to have been here before
Monday 12 October
Niamh Seana Meehan
This one day performance workshop led by visual artist Niamh Seana Meehen explored the shaping of language and its relationship to the landscape. Framed around Meehan’s research of Samuel Beckett, How Is It, the text was read, decompiled and performed - and looked at the ways performing text can be physical, tangible and public.
Samuel Beckett’s How It Is from a stylistic point of view is devoid of punctuation. The text(s) compile units of breath, fragmented language that should be read aloud. The units of text(s) are made up of false starts, waits, self-corrections, interruptions, pauses and repetition. The narrator's voice or voices are searching for the word that fits. How It Is portrays a sense of un-doing, having fragments of rumbled notes that Beckett invites the reader to shape.
The event focused on the shape of the words, dissecting them, paying close attention to the muscle movement and how we shape our mouths to form the words. Our mouths become tools, like in space they twist and turn. Each participant was given a pocket notebook and pen to document their process, questions or uncertainties. Voice recorders recorded the conversations and reading processes. This workshop presented the participant with an opportunity to reflect, think and question reading, language and self-writing. The participant encountered language and in their own words responded to encountering Beckett’s text. Do they hear different voices, different meanings? What does it mean to read a text? Does that change when you read it backwards? Does reading allow you to enter a space of freedom? How does that change your physical space?
Writing in an Art Practice
Suzanne Walsh, Kevin Breathnach and The Tangerine
Saturday 17 - Sunday 18 October
Lazarus Lingua
Text and Performativity - Suzanne Walsh
Suzanne Walsh facilitated an online workshop on writing in an art practice, and the different ways in which this manifests, such as art criticism, publishing and performance. Reading a text for a lecture, artist talk or performance can be transformed with some oratorical attention. Suzanne presented on the importance of text within her own art practice and how her writing has become cross disciplinary.
Language to Go - Kevin Breathnach
With reference to a variety of literary examples of estrangement from language, from Hildegard of Bingen’s mystical Lingua Ignota; to Raymond Roussel’s proto-mechanical procés; through to the author's own method, developed in his most recent work Morphing, this workshop explored strategies with which a writer might escape their own language—its grammar, syntax, even vocabulary—so as to write it anew, with no apparent sense or subject, deformed to the point of beauty / ugliness.
'It was there on the platform that I saw him...' ?
The Tangerine
The Tangerine and Catalyst Arts presented an evening of online readings with poets Padraig Regan, Stephen Sexton and Zosia Kuczyńska on the relationship between text and image. These poets expand the idea of ‘ekphrasis’, that is writing in response to visual source materials, by taking their cues from reproductions, video games, installations and other sources beside painting and photography. They also ask questions about how we engage with art, bodily, emotionally and intellectually.