JOANNE LAWS INTERVIEWS EIMEAR WALSHE AND SARA GREAVU ABOUT THE FORTHCOMING REPRESENTATION OF IRELAND AT THE 60TH VENICE BIENNALE.
Joanne Laws: Can you briefly discuss the new work you have been developing for the Irish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale this year?
Eimear Walshe: The exhibition is called ‘ROMANTIC IRELAND’ and comprises a sculptural work, which in turn contains a video installation, that is then soundtracked by an opera work. These three elements have a complex temporal relationship with each other, almost as a past, present and future format. The video depicts a chaotic and socially fraught building site, in which seven characters have somehow time travelled from different moments in history to work side by side on an earth build. There are two characters from a late nineteenth-century tenant-farmer class; an early twentieth-century politician or businessman and his housewife; a late twentieth-century barrister and her stay-at-home farmer husband; and me as a twenty-first-century single landlord. A soap operatic drama unfolds in the building site, with moments of conflict, and moments of harmony and collaboration, as they work towards the same goal.
The opera is next in the temporal sequence. Cork-based composer Amanda Feery invited me to write a libretto in response to Éamon de Valera’s speech, The Ireland That We Dreamed Of (or On Language & the Irish Nation), which he delivered as Taoiseach on St Patrick’s Day in 1943. In Venice, we are presenting just one act of this much larger opera. There are many contentious images in de Valera’s speech, but one line describes “a countryside filled with bright and cosy homesteads” and a “reverence, respect and care for the elderly.” The libretto very much responds to these themes through the story of an old man, who is listening to this speech on his deathbed and wakes up to the sound of being evicted. The libretto chronicles the man’s relationship with the building and its symbiotic relationship with the environment. As an optimistic, speculative gesture, building anticipates structures and environments that will be used by people in the future. The libretto connects with post-revolutionary periods in colonised lands, foregrounding notions of betrayal, and the failure of the promise of building.
Eimear Walshe, ROMANTIC IRELAND, 2023, production still; photographs by Faolán Carey, courtesy of the artist and Ireland at Venice.
JL: Perhaps you could outline your research and writing processes for the libretto?
EW: Amanda is a classically accomplished composer but is also deeply experimental as a musician. So, you rarely get a better scenario than that, in terms of scope for writing. One of my first decisions was for most of the libretto to rhyme rather conventionally, which was quite fun as a writing parameter. In addition, Amanda and I were very interested in non-textual ‘mouth sounds’, so there is an emphasis on vowel sounds throughout. An important historical source was Irish folk ballads, which allowed me to access the emotional impact of a story as the characters bear witness to both the quotidian and the tragic. Key songs included Tumbling Through the Hay – which I first heard on Ian Lynch’s podcast, Fire Draw Near, and which chronicles the orgiastic romp of workers at harvest time; The Limerick Rake, which is rowdy and full of inuendo, describing a womaniser who has aspirations to create a homestead with all of his lovers; and the ballad, Dónal Óg, which I find quite devastating, in terms of its rhyming systems and turn of phrase, and its depiction of rejection and betrayal.
Another important influence on the writing was working with Dr Lisa Godson, who advised on the historical accuracy of the scenarios I was describing. I was also inspired by Jonny Dillon’s Blúiríní Béaloidis podcast from The National Folklore Collection at UCD, particularly one about mythology surrounding the house, which describes the burial of horse’s heads and coins, and different building traditions. It helped me to think about this man’s relationship with his house as something far beyond property to consider his intrinsic connection with the building materials – from the fixing of thatch and lime rendering to knowing the person who laid the first stones. This sits in contrast to contemporary alienation from our built environment – the result of outsourcing materials to underpaid workers in the Global South. Nowadays, we are not only disadvantaged by not understanding how our buildings work, but we are also creating terrible conditions elsewhere, through cheaper materials that are deeply inefficient in a wider ecological sense.
JL: How does the sculptural artefact resonate with your ongoing research inquiries relating to housing, habitation, and shelter?
EW: In the system of the work, the sculpture exists as a kind of aftermath. It laments the Sisyphean labour of making a building that will never amount to anything other than a ruin. Even though the sculptural object itself is potentially quite stark, I do find earth building an incredibly exciting and inspiring process. I learned about cob building, among other skills, when I did a course with Harrison Gardner at Common Knowledge – a skills sharing social enterprise for sustainable living located in County Clare, where the ‘ROMANTIC IRELAND’ set-building and filming later took place. There is something empowering about remembering that communities once came together to undertake this incredibly labour-intensive, slow process of building with materials that were cheap, free, or available on site. This is exciting on the level of community because you need to extend your kith and kin to include a wider network of co-builders. It’s fascinating to watch the process, which is very sensory, visceral, and physical, and it’s also mystifying that such simple structures using compressed earth have survived so long. One example is the ancient communal settlement, Tell es-Sultan, located northwest of Jericho in Palestine, which dates from 10,000 BC – a moment in human history when people began to settle and come together to create not only domestic buildings, but much larger collective spaces for gathering. Cob building can be perceived as a local tradition in Ireland, while also being a global tradition that goes back centuries with regional variations. These social, environmental, and historic elements are what led to this material becoming such a central part of the exhibition.
JL: As stated in the press material, your work “speaks of and from a precarious generation” and “emerges from the context of a nation in escalating crisis.” Can you elaborate on this?
EW: The reason I did a building course and learned about cob was because I felt that if I was ever going to own a house, I would probably need to have the skills to build one myself. At the time I was converting a van, so a lot of these skills were applicable. What led me to the cob material was housing precarity, and it opened a portal into the past. When you live in a crisis as acute, illogical, enraging, needlessly violent, and destructive as this one, you end up looking to history for guidance. In researching the history of housing and land activism, I learnt about the demands people were making in the late-nineteenth century, as well as the political promises that were being made and broken.
JL: How are you getting to grips with the vast logistics of Venice – from shipping and install limitations, to language considerations?
Sara Greavu: We are relying heavily on partners and collaborators with knowledge and experience. I guess we are learning how to think about a project at a different scale and trusting these partners to carry elements of the work with their own expertise. We are so lucky to work with such brilliant installation, technical, and communications partners, who are helping us to navigate these waters.
JL: Have some of the previous Ireland at Venice curators, commissioners, and artists reached out to share their experience and advice?
SG: Everyone has been so generous! I would particularly note Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, whose advice and experience have been so essential to us as we jumped into the planning and work. Michael Hill made a public offer to anyone applying to the open call last year that he would be happy to speak to them about the process, and he has continued in this spirit of generosity and care. I think it makes sense to establish a more robust way to hand over knowledge gained in this process, and we will feed back some of our experiences. We’ll also try to be as generous as our predecessors in sharing information with future teams.
JL: In pragmatic terms, has it been challenging to conceptualise such a large-scale international solo exhibition?
EW: I haven’t had time to think about it! I found out in May 2023 and the work had to be finished by December, so there hasn’t been time to have doubts. I had to be extremely decisive from the start and developed the work by expanding my existing research, and choosing where to venture out into new, ambitious terrain. For example, I’ve never worked with such a big film crew or cast before. I’m lucky to have an amazing critical community around me, in the form of my friends who are practicing artists. As Assistant Director, Niamh Moriarty kept the whole project on track, while Aoife Hammond liaised with the performers to make sure they were happy with the conditions; they were performing, filming, directing each other, wearing uncomfortable masks, and not wearing shoes. So, when you’re scaling up the production ambition, you also need to have someone looking after the project and the people involved. Getting to work with all these experts and incredible performers has been a massive career highlight for me.
JL: How has the Irish pavilion (building and site) informed the exhibition you intend to present in the space, especially with regard to access and the circulation of visitors?
SG: We talked a lot from the very beginning about the audience encounter with the work, and the depleted attention-economy of Venice. People arrive to the Irish pavilion having already seen so much, feeling tired, overwhelmed, or even jaded. I think Eimear has been very smart about imagining this moment and considering how to induce people into the space and hold their attention, by offering different points of connection and engagement with the work.
JL: What are your thoughts on the Venice Biennale – or global biennials more broadly – as platforms for the practices and urgencies of contemporary art?
SG: Yes, this is a huge question that deserves more attention and sustained critical discussion. I have mixed feelings about biennales generally, while at the same time recognising what an incredible opportunity it is to be able to participate in this important international space for the sharing of ideas and practices. Of course, only certain types of work can thrive there. And the snapshot of the practices and urgencies of contemporary art that we see there is so conditioned by economic and political power and privilege. There are so many nations who can’t afford to set up a pavilion and send an artist, or who don’t have the political recognition to do so.
JL: What does this mean for you, to represent Ireland in Venice, at this stage of your career?
EW: I felt very ready to make a work of this scale, and it has been thrilling to have the opportunity to do so. In terms of ambition, what I want to get from this project is to continue developing shows, performances, projects, and collaborations in Ireland. I have an ongoing project called ‘TRADE SCHOOL’ that, if I work fast, will probably take 45 years to complete. It involves making a film work in every county of Ireland. Occasionally getting to work in other countries is equally exciting, inspiring, generative, and important for me.
JL: Can you discuss the Ireland at Venice national tour?
SG: Our plan for the Irish tour builds on Eimear’s established methodology of travelling to and drawing from rural and peripheral locations to make and share the work. We have talked about it in terms of acting within the bardic tradition of carrying stories from one place to another, and they will return to present this project in some of the specific places that inspired the work. Materially, the exhibition is thinking about and through ideas of malleability, so you can expect to see the work taking different forms in different spaces.
The 60th International Art Exhibition runs from 20 April to 24 November 2024 (preview 17-19 April).
labiennale.org
Ireland at Venice is an initiative of Culture Ireland in partnership with the Arts Council, with Principal Sponsorship from Dublin City Council.
irelandatvenice2024.ie
