Fancy going on a day trip to Galway to see some art? On Friday the 21st of November we’re taking a group trip down to TULCA 2025, and you’re invited! 

This will be a full day trip; the plan atm is to get the 9:25 train from Heuston to Galway (Ceannt) and the 19:25 train home. You can come along at any time and meet us along the way too if needed. Most places open 12-6, so we should have enough time to make it around to each spot, and will be taking it at a nice pace – plenty of time to grab a coffee, some lunch etc. throughout the trip. Galway is lovely this time of year; I believe the Christmas market is up in Eyre Square when we’ll be there.

If you would love to come along, but the price of the trains is a barrier for you atm, get onto me and we can sort it with you. Please RSVP if you’re coming along so I know who to keep an eye out for on the day. Hope you can make it! 

This year’s TULCA is one of many contemporary art programmes that attempt to engage with our current global crisis, and its partitioning of us from our communities, our ecosystems, our inherited knowledge systems, and from even a shared understanding of ‘we’.

The island of Ireland has, in the last few years, been host to a series of cultural interventions that aim to confront this from multiple angles; whether that’s by examining the border as a core agent of separation, forming strategies for collectivity through international connections, or by entangling the nation with its colonial history, which is transposed like a spectre in our contemporary lives. Strange lands still bear common ground emerges from a desire to add weight to voices calling for an urgent, direct, and fractal strategy toward new ways of relating in our shared world.

In Conversations Across Place, Francis Whorral Campbell writes: “It is no longer possible to pretend that there are ‘other’ places and times untouched by the devastation at hand.” Taking this as a provocation, the festival asks us to question the value of separating the alien from the familiar. It also invites us to consider, with full awareness of our intertwined world, how we might move in concert with the land, the sea, the stranger, the creature, the here, and the elsewhere.

Mapping acts as a thematic framework and strategy for exhibition making. This work shown focuses on reorientation; unsettling an assumed stance and turning again toward others, in order to renegotiate how we inhabit the world together. The artists featured are from Ireland and abroad, and often work within broad collaborations, with their work too, foregrounding themes of interconnectivity, encounter, desire, and negotiation. It unfolds across sites in Galway, through its airwaves, and in a satellite exhibition in New York.