When the Junction Festival opens its doors next month, visitors to Clonmel will find themselves welcomed into a series of temporary cafe spaces, each offering a novel way of getting cultural, writes ROSITA BOLAND.
WHERE SOME SEE failure, artists see opportunity. Everyone will have noticed some shop or cafe near where they live that has closed its doors in recent months and not yet been replaced by a new business. Thus it is in Clonmel, where five enterprising artists are converting five currently empty business spaces around the town into “creative cafes” for the duration of the forthcoming Junction Festival.
“People who wouldn’t go to a theatre to see a show might go to a cafe instead,” says festival director David Teevan. “The idea is that the cafes will create an environment where the public can explore their own creativity.”
The festival was helped out by a special commissioning grant from the Arts Council for the project.
“Perhaps the most exciting aspect of the project is that the outcome is so unsure, because of the novelty,” Teevan adds.
So what can people expect to find on the “Cafes Carte Blanche” trail around Clonmel? Well, for a start, it is not just catering to humans – or “non-animals”, as visual artist Austin McQuinn, who lives in Fethard, calls us. You’ll need a dog to gain access to his space on Market Place, which is called the Canine Cafe.
“You won’t be allowed in without a dog,” he confirms happily. “The space will be for dogs and their companions to meet and socialise. There are so many places you can’t go with a dog, so I’m creating a different kind of space. Dog-owners have a certain way of relating to each other. My role as an artist will be to provide a social experiment.”
There will be “cuisine for dogs” and seating for both them and their two-legged escorts. McQuinn will be interviewing, photographing and recording people’s stories of how they acquired their dogs.
“Dogs have a role in society we take for granted: companions, helpers, guide dogs, scavengers, rebels,” he says. At the start of every day, he’ll put up images of those people who visited the cafe the previous day, thus creating an ongoing form of visual documentary. The curious non-animal public who don’t own dogs can look in through the window, or stand in a special viewing space just inside the door – but be warned, you may get barked at.
Visual artist Pat Looby’s cafe, Shrine, located on Mitchell Street in a premises that formerly offered Chinese acupuncture, was inspired by an exhibit in Clonmel’s South Tipperary County Museum. According to Looby, in 1945, the locally based Sisters of Charity decided to make a special tabernacle to commemorate their centenary. They invited members of the public to donate their jewellery – gold, precious, and semi-precious stones – to decorate the tabernacle’s interior. The piece is now on display in the museum.
“I wanted to do a contemporary take on it,” says Looby. She has commissioned a cabinet-maker to make her a large wooden tabernacle-shaped shrine, two feet long by two-and-a-half feet high. Looby is inviting the public to bring unwanted non-precious jewellery – beads, plastic baubles, costume jewellery – to the cafe. “The plan is to make a collaborative sculptural object out of these contemporary ’relics’.”
Donors will be able to have a say in where they would like their offerings placed, and Looby will be working on the design from day to day, with the work-in-progress being placed in the shop window each night for passers-by to see. She’s not sure yet what will happen to the end result, but is hoping that the museum might be interesting in temporarily displaying it, along with the piece it’s inspired by.
Looby will also be inviting people to bring in special pieces of their precious jewellery and to tell her the histories of each piece. These rings and brooches and pendants are not destined to decorate the wooden shrine, but will remain with their owners, so don’t worry about making an unintentional donation of your engagement ring. She plans on photographing each of these pieces, with their owners, and exhibiting them in the cafe from day to day, and possibly also making aural recordings of the stories.
WRITER MIA GALLAGHER will be running The Writing Room, on O'Connell Street, in a space that was once, fittingly, a bookshop.
“I wanted to create a space that would expand people’s idea of what writing is. I really don’t want the space to feel like a classroom,” Gallagher says. “So there will be lots of modular furniture, low tables and chairs, so that people can be together if they like, or also just write quietly or read on their own.”
A schedule will be posted daily for various writing workshops, one of which will focus on "finding your narrative voice". There will be a poetry tea party with poet Grace Wells, a regular "Talking Shop" session to discuss cultural topics, and a book-club session focusing on Claire Kilroy's latest novel, All Names Have Been Changed.
The concept of Priscilla Robinson's Robinson's Sunday Roadshow Cafeis inspired by her childhood Sundays. A Dublin-based writer and performer, Robinson came from a Northern Ireland Baptist home. In the 1970s, her father set up a short-lived lay church in Dublin's Pearse Street, and Sundays were an open house for friends and neighbours who wanted to drop in. Her father preached sermons and her mother served home-baking, while Robinson played board games and took notes during the sermons. Television wasn't allowed on that day, so it's a nice irony that her cafe location on Parnell Street once housed a company that sold satellite and cable television.
“I wanted to try and recreate those Sundays,” Robinson says. “I like to try and create communities in different ways.”
The plan is that her cafe will be a cross between living history, improvisation and audience participation. There will be a dining-room table, board games, a record player with a variety of period records, and armchairs. Robinson will be baking rock buns, gypsy creams and gingerbread on site, which she hopes will be nearly as delicious as her mother’s baking. Her mother will be present at the cafe to contribute to an authentic experience. In addition, Robinson will be playing recordings of her mother telling family stories.
“One of the recordings is my mother talking about all the things she wasn’t allowed to do on Sundays as a child,” Robinson says. “Like, she could paddle in the sea, but she couldn’t go swimming. There’s also the story of how she met my father, and stories about Quaker meetings she went to in Northern Ireland.”
Robinson will show slide-shows of images from the notebooks she kept on Sundays as a child, of Bible drawings and comments on her father’s sermons. She hopes that the people who come to her cafe will tell stories of their own memories of childhood Sundays, and she intends to record these stories in some way.
“I’m still figuring it all out in my head,” she confesses. “It’ll be very much a work in progress, depending on the kind of people who arrive at the cafe.”
Dance cafe The Break Station, on Market Place, will be run by Vicki Amedume, director of aerial company Upswing, and its choreographer, Leila McMillan, both based in England. They'll be offering two dance classes a day, including breakdance, hip hop, house, and krumping. Krumping?
“It’s a style of dance that originated in LA,” Amedume explains. “It can look quite aggressive, but it’s really, really beautiful.”
Their intention is to train some of the volunteers provided by the festival each day as support, and thus “we’ll be able to leave a skill behind us in the town”. Amedume and McMillan are also hoping to put on a big show before the cafes close up for good, with the participation of those members of the public who have come during the festival and taken their dance classes.
One of the other things on offer in The Break Stationis a regular "love theme hour". People are invited to bring along a recording of a song they associate with romance in some way, whether a first slow dance as a young one, a wedding song, or something that rings the romance bell. Presumably, it would be an interesting bonus for everyone present if you also brought along the person you originally danced with, and tried to recreate that loving moment.
Clonmel Junction Festival runs from July 4 to 12; junctionfestival.com. Cafes Carte Blanche are all free and all open daily from from July 4 to 11, between 11am and 7pm
