Highlights
Highlight photos and videos from Act I 2022 and Act II 2023
A truly inspiring gathering of partners in Budapest, kindly hosted by Budapest Brand. A productive and enriching two days – partners spoke about their 2024 events in Leeuwarden, Eleusis, Oulu and Berlin and looked forward to events in Act III this year – Budapest and Lugo continuing their journey with unexpected extra events, Lisbon and Dublin, and all culminating in the YES Festival in Derry-Donegal.
The specially commissioned ULYSSES European Odyssey book and the project’s arts & society publication were discussed in detail, with a chance to see the first design approach for the book by Marseille based visual artists and project partners, Gethan&Myles.
The Ambassador of Ireland to Hungary, Mr. Ragnar Almqvist, kindly hosted a dinner at his residency, which was also attended by the representatives of James Joyce Society and Leopold Bloom Foundation from Szombathely, from where Bloom’s father came.
A highlight of the trip was the unveiling of the 1922 edition of Ulysses, kindly brought by Benedict Schlepper-Connolly from the Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI). A real honour for us all
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Just over a year ago (October 2022) the artists gethan&myles created We All Fall / Récit in Marseille last October with Collectif ildi ! eldi, inspired by the Lotus Eaters episode of Ulysses.
We All Fall / Récit was developed as participatory multi-disciplinary performance on the theme of immigration, porosity and integration, under the Mediterranean sun and open to the local community and visitors alike. The public were to be both spectators and co-creators. As an immersive experience, the audience was enveloped by the human reality of the stories of exile: the heroes, the swimmers and the drowned, the survivors and the disappeared, the hundreds of thousands caught in their movement, suspended outside community and time, within a system that offers uncertainty, anxiety, violence and still, somehow, hope.
We All Fall / Récit credits: Presented by gethan&myles and ildi! eldi with the support of Ateliers Jeanne Barret, Comede, CIERES, Les Ateliers des Artistes en Exil, la Comédie de Valence, l’ADAMI and INSEAMM – Les Beaux-Arts de Marseille.
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In celebration of the James Joyce’s epic Ulysses, the Embassy of Ireland held a Bloomsday event with host Rosie Goldsmith, featuring performances from Damien Molony, Fran Lock, Laura Aherne, Tiffany Qiu, and Cormac Ó Briain.
We were also delighted to host an overview of the Ulysses European Odyssey Project, an epic endeavour from 2022-2024 across 18 cities in 16 countries, producing artistic responses in public spaces to social and cultural themes identified in the 18 episodes of James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Click here to watch the event.
IrishEmbassyUK (@irishembassyuk) • Instagram photos and videos
Embassy of Ireland (@IrelandEmbGB) / X (twitter.com)
#GlobalIreland
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On 19th and 20th July 2023 all the partners met for a consortium city gathering in Zurich, one of the cities where Joyce wrote Ulysses, and where he is buried. Zurich is linked to episode XII, Homer’s book 9, in which Odysseus travels to the land of the Cyclopes, a rough and uncivilised race of one-eyed giants. We therefore took the cyclops, Joyce’s disruptive writing technique, gigantism, the fiery tone of episode XII in its bar setting and the anonymity of The Citizen as a firm inspiration for our approach to our gathering!
Our Zurich Gathering started with a very special reception and talk at the Joyce Foundation. The Foundation was established in 1985 with a view to keeping alive the memory and work of Joyce for the literary world in general, and in particular for Zurich. Fritz Senn, founder and director of the Foundation, and his colleague Ursula Zeller, gave us an inspiring talk about Joyce in Zurich and the Cyclops episode. It was an honour to be there and to meet Fritz and Ursula and we are profoundly grateful for their warm welcome (and the loan of their Biscuit Tin!).
The gathering took place at the Literaturhaus and was an intensive and insightful two days. It was amazing to see how projects had developed since our Paris Gathering and the commitment of our partners to their artistic event and their research into their contemporary European theme. There is no doubt that the activism which sits in each theme has grown in strength in the foci of each public event and symposium, and that the urgency of the themes explored is a real inspiration for the partners.
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On 2nd and 3rd February 2023 all the partners met for a second consortium city gathering.
During the gathering we discussed how we maintain a creative dialogue with the dead, inspired by the Hades episode (Episode V) of Ulysses. We shared reflections on the influence individually chosen past inhabitants of a city – in particular its creative figures – have on its present and future.
We discussed in detail various aspects of the project and saw presentations from Act II and Act III cities, updating us on the creative development of their projects.
Most crucially we discussed the Charter 309 – our Arts & Society Symposia publication. They were fascinating sessions, unpicking the themes of the project and the questions they prompted regarding the role of Arts & Society in a Better Future Europe. The charter will be published on this website in the Autumn of 2024.
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This participatory multi-disciplinary performance on the theme of immigration, porosity and integration, was open to the local community and visitors alike. The public were both spectators and co-creators. An intimate, immersive experience; the audience was enveloped by the human reality of the stories of exile and embodied, for a moment, the heroes, the swimmers and the drowned, the survivors and the disappeared, the hundreds of thousands caught in their movement, suspended outside community and time, within a system that offers uncertainty, anxiety, violence and still, somehow, hope.
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Italian actor, Andrea Germani, was a special guest at the Nestory symposium as Trieste’s response to episode 2 of Ulysses exploring the theme Weight of History.
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Riccardo Cepach, Museo Joyce Trieste’s Director, led the open discussion with a deeply engaged audience during the Nestory symposium in Trieste. The Trieste symposium on the theme of Weight of History actively engaged people of varying ages. The discussion was inspired by Joyce’s book and found themes and resonances which were simultaneously universal, global and local: trade, liberalism, epidemics, peace, language, economics, debt, coexistence, feminism, freedom.
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During the first Partner Gathering in Trieste, the partners met for the first time. A wonderful occasion when partners finally got to meet each other in ‘real life’ after developing the project digitally during the Corona epidemic.
At this first Partner Gathering, project partners discussed the episode theme of Weight of History. Inspired by the Ulysses quote ‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’, each partner presented on a defining moment in their city’s history which shaped their city and how they viewed it.
Vilnius City Museum approached their symposium on the theme of Urban renewal and the reinvention of the city through holding a series of walking tours around the city where the various historical and modern neighbourhoods were visited with guides. The Vilnelė River connects different urban Vilnius settings, from post-industrial landscapes to the Old Town. It is a metaphor of the city in perpetual change, a connector of different socio-spatial environments, different scenarios of future development of neighbourhoods.
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Budapest kicked off their episode with workshops and a symposium which will feed into their public events in spring 2023 and 2024. The role of neighbourhood communities was explored and discussed as citizens are together in the first step to creating the Budapest Grand Novel – a reminding and exploring of the city on its 150th anniversary.
The core output of the Budapest episode, the Grand Novel of Budapest is based on shared thinking and collaboration, and to this end, potential partners were invited to an interactive workshop as the first step in a nearly two-year process.
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In a live music and dance performance entitled Movement Kipseli, all ages and backgrounds came together to celebrate different cultures coming together – and fitting together – in the city, deliberately out of step with the restrictive rhythms of national citizenship.
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