Cuislí are Bernadette Hopkins, Ailbhe Hines and Aodán McCardle
Guy Debord suggests, in The Society of the Spectacle, an unconscious dilemma where our language is not our own, he says ‘for the spectacle is both the meaning and the agenda of our particular socio-economic formation.’ (Debord, 11)
We are three artists whose collaboration developed out of the Art of Resistance Collective’s attention to Human Rights and Social Justice issues globally. Our artistic practices all come together in a shared experience of the border in the Northern Ireland context, of settler and planter, as a dis/place/ment. Our relationship to Civil, Economic and State authority is one where definitions of legitimacy and power existed and continue to exist outside of our space.
Beyond the Immediate Genetic Snare, our first joint work curated by Bernadette Hopkins and performed by Áilbhe Hines and Aodán McCardle is an improvised performance, text and spoken word artwork that developed within the cultural exchange event ‘Candle for Gaza’ investigating dehumanizing practices which affect all sides in conflict, both colonized and colonizer.
Our current practice investigates the ‘Structuring structures’ that define, confine and indeed dictate people’s communication, development and self awareness. Oppressed populations are crucial subjects in the analysis of power structures. For instance the woman in a patriarchal society and as a colonial subject has no language for ‘domestic violence’ that will be recognized, understood or admitted by the oppressor. The structural violence, the architecture and administration of within that oppression is a humiliation and dispossession of voice and language. Using improvisation and collaboration as actions, we investigate self and the other finding this distracts the ego and prevents pre-determined analysis.
Susan Sontag: As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible. (Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 98)
Cuislí
Performances
2015-2018
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Collaboration with Bernadette Hopkins and Áilbhe Hines. Performancewriting, Bodytracing, Markmaking, Vocalisation, live Art. Response to the structuring structures of social and political administration .
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Our current practice investigates the ‘Structuring structures’ that define, confine and indeed dictate people’s communication, development and self awareness. Oppressed populations are crucial subjects in the analysis of power structures. For instance the woman in a patriarchal society and as a colonial subject has no language for ‘domestic violence’ that will be recognized, understood or admitted by the oppressor. The structural violence and dehumanization implicit in colonization is a humiliation and dispossession of voice and language. If we are made within these conditions, of these materials, how can we respond. Improvisation and Collaboration as actions, with doubt at their core, investigate the self and the other, disrupt the ego and remain open.
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There is a line and once you cross it your life is no longer your own but we do not know where the line is until it has been crossed. Our performance has as its main theme the ‘Architecture of Occupation’. Within the remit of this ‘particular historical field of human relations’ our performance is an investigation of the conscious and unconscious administrations we succumb to or bend under in order to traverse the diversity of social media, political, gender, race, creed, nationalist and international human relations.
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In ‘Three People in a Room at a Table’, Cuislí will question the edge of performance itself. They will consider the gallery space as a studio space, marking out the parameters of their investigation and invite the audience to observe. Writing, mark-making, sound and projection investigate the edges made. A presence is left with imprints of language formed by tongue and body. Therein emerges a set of questions; whether this collective investigation would be performance, or the consideration of a performance; whether this will be art, or the consideration of art.
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Residency where a performance is developed over the course of one week using the resistance inherent in actions of collaboration to explore ‘Structuring Structures’ series on social and ethical controls.
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You begin and then it happens and it was already happening and it continues to happen.
The Gallery Space as Studio Space, thinking and working, is it art? Outreach, Workshop, studio, the audience becomes part of a live writing/drawing performance
