Publication | The World Was All Before Them

The World Was All Before Them
Edited by Stephen Connolly
for TULCA Festival of Visual Arts

A new book produced as part of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts 2022. Commissioned by Clare Gormley and edited by Stephen Connolly, The World Was All Before Them features new work by seven writers: Simon Costello, Dane Holt, Miriam Gamble, Michael Magee, Padraig Regan, Trenna Sharpe and Sacha White.

The World Was All Before Them

  • Introduction by Stephen Connolly

  • By The Lagan by Trenna Sharpe

  • Mostly Full Coverage, an illustrated essay by Michael Magee

  • Six Poems by Dane Holt

  • Mushroom Poems by Simon Costello

  • Of The Suburbs, an essay by Miriam Gamble

  • Echo: An Erasure by Padraig Regan

  • A Poem in Eight Parts by Sacha White

Published by The Lifeboat Press

The Lifeboat Press is an independent publisher of poetry and non-fiction based in Belfast. Their recent publications have included Sure Thing by Paul Muldoon, oh! by Susannah Dickey and The Sensual Cityby Padraig Regan. Queering the Green: post-2000 Queer Irish Poetry, edited by Paul Maddern, was published in 2021.

Available to order here

Film Documentation | The World Was All Before Them

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
The World Was All Before Them
Curated by Clare Gormley
4 - 20 November 2022

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts is delighted to share the public outcomes and online documentation of its 2022 programme, The World Was All Before Them curated by Clare Gormley.

Constructed in a moment of global change, upheaval and uncertainty, the 2022 festival addresses the notion of futurity and asks what the political potentials might be in imagining new futures and envisioning new ways of being in this world.

Taking its title from the final lines of John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, which recounts Adam and Eve’s journey out of Eden and into a new, unknown world, the festival seeks to take stock of our current moment and imagine what lies ahead, as we too find ourselves on a precipice: of ecological destruction, humanitarian crisis, mass migration, global pandemics, wars and technological over-saturation. Surely, there has never been such an urgent time to challenge the structures of our current existence, and to seek out visions of future worlds worth living in. 

Disrupting traditional western, capitalistic, theistic tendencies to imagine the future as either utopian or dystopian, the festival will instead conjure a vision of the future as inextricably tied to the world we live in now: its inequities, as well as its possibilities. As such, it is less invested in depicting the world we might create, than in questioning how it is we might make our existing world a more liveable place. 

The intention is to map a more expansive, non-binary, open-ended and fluid conception of what might lie ahead, through an engagement with a form of futurity rooted in a politics of livability, not escapism or mastery. 

By-passing and critiquing the notion that technology alone might save us, this edition of TULCA seeks out practices which engage, among other things; civics, alliances, poetics, politics, bodies, dance, movement, language, decoloniality, sociality, connectivity, collectively and the quotidian acts of everyday existence as among the tools of future world-making.

Contributors to The World Was All Before Them are artists, filmmakers, writers and poets: Anouk Kruithof, Becca Albee, Berte & Harmey, Caroline Jane Harris, Chloe Cooper, Christopher Steenson, Elise Rasmussen, Emily Speed, Esmeralda Conde Ruiz, Judith Dean, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Michael Hanna, Nicoline van Harskamp, Quentin Lacombe, Tabitha Soren, Tadhg Ó Cuirrín and The Lifeboat.

Image: Installation view of Bare Map 'BMg" and Bare Map 'BMo' by berte & harmey, TULCA Gallery, St Augustine St, Galway. Photo: Ros Kavanagh
Video documentation: Jonathan Sammon

Celebrating 20 years of TULCA

Celebrating 20 years of TULCA

"After two decades of producing contemporary art, it’s tempting to indulge in a nostalgic backward glance. Indeed, TULCA has produced important work that has highlighted social inequalities, brought audiences to hidden pockets of our city and county and opened conversations about how we might address the world in a new key. But, as this edition of TULCA curated by Clare Gormley reminded us, to be contemporary requires accepting the future as abiding yet unknowable.

Making a festival is a very tangible thing, something acutely felt staging an exhibition against a backdrop of inclement weather and spatial squeeze. The future on the other hand seems free of these limitations. Rather it represents an expansive vista of mercurial possibility, where apocalypse and perfection are equally close at hand. The effect is a future at once enticing and terrifying, a pressure of possibility that encourages the maintenance of the status quo while we tussle over what ‘might be.’ This year’s festival asks us to break away from these conversations that, like a finely tuned Rube-Golberg machine circuitously return us to an unchanging present.

Instead, it prompts us to interrogate the forces that atrophy talk about the future. What emerges are works that employ a variety of languages to explore the forces that animate the material world. From cartography to dance, poetry to photography, installation and film, artists in the festival are interested in the unspoken dialogues between nature and its persistent reorganisation in and through language, history, technology and geometry. The celebration of processes and the ‘in-progress’ here remind us that the future is not some far-flung province. Rather, the future exists in the present moment in the same way that the past reverberates in the now.

If we abandon the prospect of conquering the future (successfully or otherwise,) we are left with a curious alternative. The acknowledgement that the future abides with us, constitutive of the present in the same way as the past. This makes the ‘contemporary’ a striking mix of historical narrative and unvoiced claims. Accepted as something impossible to objectively know, we learn that; “the life in expectation is our constant present” a reality that there is no objective perspective on either past or future.1 Far from being a nihilistic claim, the conversations opened in this iteration of TULCA echo an imperative that drives our annual making of a festival. That we should in ways small, surprising, poetic and yes, imperfect step tangibly into a future of our own (re)making.

On this, our 20th edition, the board of TULCA would like to thank those that help us explore the past and future of our present moment. Our fabulous team and the funders, local businesses, institutions and audiences who help us make this tangible thing.

Here’s to its future!"

Lucy Elvis
On Behalf of the TULCA Board of Directors

Archive video: Jonathan Sammon / Music credit: Jonathan Sammon
Lead image credit: Michael John Whelan, From the Mountain (2014), still from single channel HD video, monochrome, sound, 9:30 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Grey Noise, Dubai.

Supported by the Arts Council Ireland | Galway City Council | Galway County Council