Artist Insights: Caroline Mac Cathmhaoil | TULCA 2025
Artist Insights is an ongoing interview featuring artists participating in TULCA Festival of Visual Arts. Through short filmed conversations, the series offers insight into artistic processes, thematic concerns, and the ideas shaping each edition of the festival.
Caroline Mac Cathmhaoil
Caroline Mac Cathmhaoil is an Irish artist, writer and filmmaker working between Dublin, London and the less explored regions of cosmic experience. They previously worked under the name Loitering Theatre. Mac Cathmhaoil’s practice is esoteric in nature, where video, text, artificial intellect, viral interference and future archaeologies of time are alchemically melded together to disrupt the technologies and belief systems of consensus reality.
In the two-channel video installation, Mirror States, two disparate islands with intertwined histories are put in mirrored reflection. In the late early twentieth century, Cuba was described in Irish and American revolutionary and political circles as ‘The Ireland of the West’. Cuba, as it was then, was proposed as the model state from which a new Ireland could be imagined. The two islands also shared an exchange of revolutionary leaders: Ireland gave Cuba its charismatic grandson, Che Guevara Lynch. In return, Cuba gave Ireland the unusually sombre and austere Eamon De Valera.
Cuba largely fulfilled the socialist dream of its uprising, with large plazas celebrating the country’s heroes. Dublin, in contrast, never developed a similar visual language of commemoration of its revolutionary triumph. The heroes of Ireland’s rising are hidden in small statues down exhaust-fumed back streets, hardly noticed, their dreams forgotten. Both islands seem to have forgotten their once common ground of political potential and comparison. Both islands now also share a strange secret United States military base in the west: Shannon Airport and Guantanamo Bay. The film, composed of footage shot between Havana and Dublin from 2022 to 2025 and interwoven with found material and online archives, asks what might be rediscovered when two histories, sometimes parallel, sometimes divergent, are brought into dialogue once more.
Video documentation: Laura Griffin