looking back and looking forward

Early last year I had the absolute pleasure of leading weekly artistic research workshops over two months with a group of individuals who engage with the services of Headway Ireland, an organisation that supports people living with acquired brain injuries. This participatory research phase was at the heart of the period of reflection, artistic research and development of my idio-aesthetic approach to experimental improvisation that I was able to undertake in 2023/2024 thanks to a Bursary Award from the Arts Council of Ireland.

We all brought our own sensory interests into the room as material and prompts for improvising, from listening to birds outside the window and walking backwards in the park, to balloon orchestras and orange peel on radiators. We experimented with different pathways for getting into ‘the zone,’ of feeling present and open to engage playfully with external and/or internal stimuli, riffing off sounds, movements and impulses. We created scores for each other, through words and drawings, which we used for further improvisations. We also had a lot of discussions about the experience of improvising.

The group brought the research to another level through these discussions, introducing the question of what impact the idea of improvisation and an idio-aesthetic approach of following your personal sensory curiosities could have outside of a workshop and performance space, in their day-to-day lives. What counts as improvisation? Does it have to happen in a certain context, or is it an attitude? Can choosing where to focus your attention be seen as a creative act in itself? Can mental and physical playfulness give you back a sense of control? Can you compose just for yourself? Would that still be art then, or something else? 

I couldn’t have asked for better collaborators in this artistic research trajectory than Maria, Mary, Clyde, Jimmy, Adele, Susan and David. They were so open, and very generous in sharing and incorporating their own personal experiments with adapted ways of engaging with their environment, physically and socially, into our experiments with improvisation

Happily, we’ll be working together again in 2025 to create an immersive interdisciplinary performance, together with some fantastic other collaborators, thanks to the support of a Project Award from the Arts Council. The project is provisionally titled HEADSONG / when the world shifts, and will be rooted in improvisation, building on the shared performance vocabulary we had already started to develop and including insights of individual collaborators about their own personal experiments with new ways of moving through the world.

Thanks to the Arts Council and to Sara, Lyndsay and Carol at Headway for their support, to Venetia Bowe and Sebastian Adams who came to jam with us, to Eszter Nemethi for helping me map out the learnings of the research, and to Gemma Gallagher for her invaluable mentoring. I’m very much looking forward to embarking on the next chapter of this collaboration!

Data Stories: research workshops with policy makers

Since last August I’ve been an artist in residence on the interdisciplinary research project Data Stories, which aims to map housing and property data and data practices in Dublin and Ireland. The project is funded by a European Research Council grant and based in Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute.

One of the case studies I’ve been working on, together with researcher Dr Carla Kayanan, looked at the rollout of the Housing Need Demand Assessment (HNDA) tool. Some of the issues that came up around the HNDA during the interview phase seemed to be present more broadly in the data ecosystem, for example a lack of clarity and criticality around what counts as evidence and the different kinds of knowledge that are used to interpret and make meaning of evidence for policy making. Earlier this yer we designed and led a series of workshops to continue to explore these issues with a broader group of stakeholders, primarly from within government, in a more interactive way.

You can read more about the workshops, and our reflections on the potential and challenges of these kinds of collaborative, interdisciplinary approaches to research, in this blog post on the Data Stories website.

Anger Club, 26.10

ANGER CLUB

THURSDAY 26 OCTOBER, 18h - 20h

One Field Fallow, Rue de l'Enseignement 62, 1000 Brussels

everything can be used / except what is wasteful / (you will need to remember this / when you are accused of destruction)

Audre Lorde, from the poem For Each of You

I’ve been getting road rage again. On my bike, while cycling through Brussels. And the violent energy that takes over me when a driver does something aggressive is scary sometimes. It’s like I’ve been handed a card saying ‘permission to be angry,’ and it just all pours out.

I’ve been thinking about the energy of anger, where it comes from and where it goes. People of marginalised genders are often socialised not to get angry. Conveniently for the powers that be. So, many of us don’t, and it transmutes into other emotions, or we turn it inwards and judge those who do not. In a year when myself and many friends and people around me have been and are experiencing sickness, burnout, fatigue, or learning to live with chronic conditions, I’ve been wondering how we create structures for sharing the emotional energy we need to get angry and stay angry, for ourselves and for each other. I mean the kind of anger that connects us rather than dividing us, one with space for acknowledging our different experiences and how we contribute to the causes of the anger of others. How do we shift how we feel and use our anger, in ways that generate energy towards change rather than drain us and those around us?

If you’d like to think about this stuff together, you are warmly welcome to join the Anger Club on Thursday 26 November. Together I’d like to try to physically map on paper the energies of our anger: where does it originate or flow from, where does it get blocked, where and when do we let it out and in what ways? What other routes or translations of our anger do we desire? Proposals of other things we might want to do together are welcome too. Or just bring yourself, your anger, and maybe a good pen. All women, trans, non-binary and gender-non-conforming folk welcome. Oh and I’ll make some soup too. Email somersdj@tcd.ie, text 0474131552, or message @someradonbelly on IG with any questions or proposals.

Idio-aesthetics research trajectory

Between the 11th and 17th of September I had the pleasure of being in residency at radical_house in Ixelles, Brussels, to begin a trajectory of participatory artistic research that I'll be working on over the next eight months.

I've been organising messing on and off since 2016, in Dublin, and later Ghent and Brussels, as a loose framework for experimental group improvisation. Initially the sessions were very informal, a chance to play around with things without a set goal. It was also the best way I could personally imagine to hang out with friends and meet new creative people. I say experimental because a big part of it was adapting and inventing and trying out scores for improvising. A lot of the joy of it came from delving into a curiosity or idea from someone else's brain.

That genre of joy has driven a lot of the projects I've done over the years, as well as a desire to create artistic platforms for diverse practices and practitioners, professionalised or otherwise. Which makes me very excited to be able to spend some focused time researching what I am calling IDIO-AESTHETICS. This is my word to talk about the fact that everyone has their own aesthetic preferences, sensitivities and curiosities. That is, artistic interest in different kinds of sensory input, be it visual, tactile, proprioceptive, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, kinesthetic etc.

Over the coming months, I will be leading participatory performance-based research with various constellations of collaborators in Dublin and Brussels, where we will test out different possible routes of creative exploration within and between our own idio-aesthetics, and based on the research develop a framework for experimental improvisation for a mixed group (of artists and non-artists, whatever those are). A messing 2.0 if you will.

I'm very much looking forward to working again with clients and staff from Headway Ireland on this, and for the first time with young people from Toop/Sint-Francsicus vzw in Brussels in a proeftuin/lab supported by Lasso vzw. I'm grateful to be able to undertake this research thanks to an Arts Participation Bursary Award from the Arts Council of Ireland and mentoring support from artists Gemma Gallagher and Heike Langsdorf/radical_house.

Big thanks to all at radical_house and the friends and peers who visited me in the residency to think (+ play + share): Betül Güven, Sam Steyaert, Aya Khedairi, Callum Bateson, Miksi Bee and Merel Stolker. Thanks also to all the messers; past, present and future.

The Fair Kin Arts Almanac

On Saturday 9th September SOTA (State of the Arts, Belgium) and friends and collaborators celebrated the launch of the Fair Kin Arts Almanac with a brunch and a parade through Brussels, with various pitstops, readings, and performances en route. The publication includes the voices of more than 130 artists, writers, and activists spinning their thoughts and experiences into 12 chapters around a year: Politics, Making Space, Education and Beyond, Parenthood, Accessibility, Ecology, Mutuality, Rest, Migration, Redistribution, Property and Open Source, and Relationality.

‘This book is a wheel – a wheel of kinship. Place it vertically in front of you, open its pages and spread them evenly around its spine. The wheel of kinship is circling around an essential working field of our society – the field of the arts.’

I was delighted to be able to contribute to the Almanac, in the form of texts for the chapter on education written collaboratively with the Out of Order Contemplaters (some of my former classmates from Autonomous Design at KASK) and an article on the Basic Income for Artists pilot scheme in Ireland for the chapter on redistribution.

It’s a beautiful polyphonic well of thoughts, ideas, essays, poems, interviews, tools, inspiring examples, practical information, illustrations and recipes. If you have any connection to the arts and often find yourself thinking about how we can create better working conditions in the field, in Belgium or otherwise, I highly recommend getting your paws on a copy! You can order one here for €20, or by sending an email to politix@state-of-the-arts.net. Alternatively you can email me if you want to borrow mine for a bit!

Anger Club, 23.5

ANGER CLUB FOR GIRLS

MONDAY 23 MAY, 18h - 20h

apartment 993, sixth floor, Mercurius building, Kikvorsstraat, Nieuw Gent

Next Monday there will be another meeting of the Anger Club in my atelier in Nieuw Gent.

This time we will do an angry punk song writing session with Magdalena Meissner, so please bring an instrument or something else you can make NOISE with. The club will be facilitated through English, and also through Dutch if desired. You can contribute to the angry song(s) in whatever language you wish! Email somersdj@tcd.ie, text 0474131552, or message @someradonbelly on IG with any questions or for directions.

All angry girls, women, trans and non-binary people welcome!

Call for participating artists

Does your artistic practice bridge disciplines or experiment with form?

Do you feel the need to connect more with other artists making similar work?

Are you interested in developing artistic practices more than products?

Do you want to build more collectivity into how you work?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, this four day pilot project (taking place on July 15th, 16th, 22nd and 23rd) could be for you. In practice(s): The wood and the trees is not a workshop or a coffee morning or a crit group. It is a collective experiment in holding space for horizontal artistic exchange and mutual support. It is a score for sharing practices and approaches, visions and frustrations; a space to make and re-make relationships with other artists and with our own practices.

Alongside collective practices that will give space for reflecting and exchanging on practical issues in our artistic and social lives, each participating artist will have an opportunity during the four days to share an element of their practice with the group. This can be a session of making, playing or performing, where everyone in the group is invited to engage with your way of working, be that your approach to a medium or theme, a tool you use, or a method or framework of creating, bringing their own practices and interests to the table as they engage with yours.

Application is open to all women and non-binary artists working in Ireland in any medium, at any stage of their career, interested in collectivity, social or experimental practices and artistic exchange. Participating artists will receive an honorarium of €200. The framework is designed and facilitated by Joan Somers Donnelly, with support from Eszter Nemethi and Heike Langsdorf. The sessions are kindly hosted in studio 468 in Rialto and Unit 44 in Stoneybatter, and are supported by an Agility Award from the Arts Council of Ireland.

To register your interest in taking part please send a statement of your motivation (max 500 words), and a description of your practice (max 300 words) with up to three samples of your work to somersdj@tcd.ie before midnight on Thursday June 9th. Alternatively you can send a short video (5 minutes) detailing your motivation and your practice, alongside the work samples. Please also indicate your availability for the four sessions, which will be full days and will take place on July 15th, 16th, 22nd and 23rd. To ensure everyone participating can share their practice and receive an honorarium, there is a limited number of spaces in the project, with preference given to those who can attend all dates. In selecting participants, the focus will be on bringing together a varied group with intersecting artistic interests and motivations, to try to create an environment of exchange that is as fruitful as possible. The work samples will be used for this purpose, and not to judge artistic merit. In the case that the project is developed further beyond this pilot, interested artists who are not selected will have the option to become involved at a later stage.

Common Ground and studio 468 are delighted to support In practice(s): The wood and the trees. studio 468 was established in 2003 and is a partnership between Common Ground and the Rialto Development Association who own and manage St Andrew’s Community Centre Rialto. studio 468 is funded by Common Ground's annual Arts Council and Dublin City Council Arts Office awards.