A very brief introduction by Jennifer Walshe
Since 2015 I have been engaged in a long-term project called Historical Documents of the Irish Avant-Garde or Aisteach. Aisteach involved the creation of a fictional history of the musical and artistic avant-garde in Ireland. This history spans 187 years, and is housed at www.aisteach.net, the website of the Aisteach Foundation, a fictional organisation which purports to be “The Avant-Garde Archive of Ireland.”
For Aisteach, I engaged a huge team of collaborators and created compositions, recordings, scores, articles and ephemera. The book of the project is available here; a digital release of music associated with the project is available on Bandcamp, as well as iTunes & Spotify.
Since its launch, Aisteach has received tremendous coverage in press and social media including features on Arena/RTÉ Radio 1, Culture File/RTÉ Lyric FM, BBC, The Irish Times, The Wire, The Quietus and many more. I’ve been invited to give talks about Aisteach and works from the archive have been performed at a wide range of institutions including the Little Museum of Dublin; New York University’s Colloquium for Unpopular Culture; The Whitechapel Gallery, London; Sonic Acts, Amsterdam and the Goethe Institute, Tokyo.
Aisteach is continually growing and expanding. By nature a communal thought experiment, a postcolonial reflection on what might have happened if Irish history had taken a different route, I feel very lucky to have been joined by so many fellow travellers over the years.
While www.aisteach.org is the key focus of the project, since the launch in January 2015 Aisteach has spilled out into the real world in the form of talks, articles, performances, exhibitions and screenings - “hyperstitions” as Marc Couroux might describe them:
The film AN GLÉACHT, which focusses on the occult soundings of Aisteach’s Caoimhín Breathnach, was commissioned by Cork Film Festival. AN GLÉACHT premiered at the Cork Film Festival in late 2015 and has since been shown at music and film festivals internationally, including at Anthology Film Archives, New York City.
In 2016 Sholto Dobie of Mucklemouth programmed a series of concerts at Mucklemouth and the Horse Hospital, London, where musicians including Panos Ghikas, Lucy Railton, Áine O’Dwyer, Angharad Davies and Lee Patterson invoked and performed music from Aisteach artists.
In 2018 The Model, Sligo hosted an extensive Aisteach exhibition, including a newly-created performance installation, called The Worlding.
Aisteach will feature in the Akademie der Künste’s exhibition Transforming Archives in Berlin in summer 2021.
Selected Reviews & Articles:
Alex Ross in The New Yorker; Toner Quinn on The Worlding in the Journal of Music; Colm McAuliffe profiles Aisteach in Frieze; Michael Dervan in The Irish Times; Ian Maleney in The Quietus; Rob Casey on Aisteach (English and French translation) in Transposition: Musique et sciences sociales; Rob Casey’s research seminar on Aisteach at Ulster University; Louise Gray on Aisteach in The Wire; Clive Bell on Aisteach at Mucklemouth in The Wire; Jennifer Walshe interviewed about Aisteach for Somerset House Studios; Tim Diovanni on Aisteach in the Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland; Ian Patterson in The Thin Air.
Listen to Tom Roseingrave’s documentary about Aisteach, Stranger Than We Thought, commissioned by RTÉ Lyric FM, here. Listen to Reggie Chamberlain King’s A Surrealist’s Map of Ireland, a BBC Radio 4 commission which examines Aisteach’s role in the Irish avant-garde, here.
AN GLÉACHT, Caoimhín Breathnach & Jennifer Walshe
Members of Tonnta with Ruairí Donovan, performing Jennifer Walshe’s The Worlding at The Model Sligo. Photo by Heike Thiele. Costume by Electronic Sheep.
Natasha Bourke performing Jennifer Walshe’s The Worlding at The Model Sligo. Photo by Heike Thiele. Costume by Electronic Sheep.