Performance week

Performance week is a.week long collaboration of research and investigations by two performance artists into personal/ social performances, initiated and curated by Sinéad O’Donnell. At a usually critical time around the 12th of July with its multitude of parades in Northern Ireland- in itself a form of public performance- this international project has the potential to counter balance cultural/poitical manifestations with subtle artistic responses.

Eliu Almonte

Regressions on a Bicycle At the end of the 80s, in one of my fantasy tours of existence, I decided to undertake an auto-regression. In those moments at the university, at a time of substantial change, I experienced openings of universal consciousness and searches for my Akashic Records.[1]
I arrived in an unknown Irish city, where I had worked as a postal delivery man during the First World War (1914-1919). Based on this synesthetic experience, I will focus my residency in Belfast on a durational test that will conclude on the day decided by the curator. On a bicycle, dressed as a postal deliveryman complete with letters in hand, I will lose myself in the cartography of Belfast. I will be intervening in homes, with multiple ‘fantasies’ of communication, opening new multi-directional dialogues of the probabilities of approach, of the different factors that make us “Be”.

[1]The Akashic Records are a universal memory of existence, a multi-dimensional space where all the experiences of the soul are archived, including knowledge and experience of past lives.

Jessica Hirst

Pour I loved alcohol. It relaxed me, it made me more social, it made me feel better about myself. Of course it sometimes made a fool of me, or even put me in danger. But all that was normal, right?
Then something changed. I woke up every morning and the first thing I did was take the dog out. Almost every day I would end up at the colmado (corner shop in the Dominican Republic) to buy a litre of rum, which I would consume by mid-afternoon and then head out for another. I had become an alcoholic.
During my residency in Belfast, I will go to both pubs and meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous and engage in conversations about what drinking, or not drinking, means to people.  I will synthesize what I learn, combined with my own story of drinking, into a participatory and highly visual performance at PS².

Sinéad O’Donnell is an artist an curator, working with performance, installation, site and time-based art..Her work explores identity, borders and barriers through encounters with territory and the territorial. She sets up actions or situations that demonstrate complexities, contradictions or commonality between medium and discipline, timing and spontaneity, intuition and methodology, artist and audience. She uses photography, video, text and collage to record her performances which often reveals an ongoing interest in the co-existence of other women and systems of kinship and identity.
Sinéad O'Donnell's practice is nomadic. Travel, chance encounters and networking has broadened her cultural perceptions and influenced her artistic sensibilities regarding time and space. She worked with PS² on several projects, both as performer and more so as initiator and curator of performance based collaborations between local and international artists.