Role Play

A conversation with Belfast-based Array Collective.

Array Collective, The Druithaib’s Ball, 2021. Photo by Ciara McMullan

Within the typology of parties there is the host, the soul of the party, the party pooper. Instead of trying to find my place within this typology, my interest instead has always been in observing the dynamics of the party itself and understand what can get unlocked and opened thanks to the liberating performative dynamics of the celebration.

In the early 2000s I had a playful running conversation with a curator friend, Maria Inés Rodríguez, around the idea of one day organizing a biennial of parties —  a biennial where every single artist would be tasked to organizing a party of sorts— a biennial where parties were the featured pieces. We were living the interesting interstice between relational aesthetics and socially engaged art, where there was an increasing desire from the part of artists to involve participants not as a passive consuming public but as active collaborators.  As much as we dreamed about this idea (“I wanted to organize it in Lisbon” she recalls) the financial and staff production costs were prohibitive.

Around that time I was also inspired by conversations with curator Gregory Volk and his own reflections on Bakhtin’s notion of the “carnivalesque” and the ways in which this literary strategy could play out in art making.

I finally got to organize a party-as-artwork in 2008, when I brought a live donkey into the Museo Carrillo Gil in Mexico City. It was part of a recreation of the medieval Feast of the Ass, a celebration that briefly was tolerated, and later forbidden, by the Christian church. Focusing on the role-reversal aspect of this celebration (the young would dress like old, women and men would switch genre identities, and the donkey would preside from the church’s altar. I was primarily interested in the role-switching aspect of the celebration, focusing the event instead in reassigning the roles of professional curators, artists, critics and the public as a pedagogical exercise to help gain understanding of each role in the ecosystem of art (no animals were hurt in the making of this event, although it’s also uncertain if they learned anything about aesthetics).

I had mostly forgotten about this performance when scholar Mónica Amieva revisited that episode in a recent text, and, also to my surprise and delight when the Belfast-based Array Collective, a group of artists an activists who  won the 2021 Turner prize, cited it in some of its research. The recognition of Array Collective is very important for the field of social practice not only by the fact that it acknowledges the work that many artists produce in the public realm that does not necessarily translate in revenue-generating object-making.

Array Collective, founded in 2016, is a group of 11 artists who collaborate in making works that  engage socio-political and human-rights issues affecting Northern Ireland. In their work they have sought to reclaim ideas about local ethnic and religious identity.

The Druithaib’s Ball, a new work for the 2021 Turner Prize, was modelled on unlicensed Irish drinking holes known as síbín. In its Belfast iteration the project was a wake for the centenary of Ireland’s partition, decorated with posters and ceiling banners advocating for peace, laughter, and reproductive rights, and denouncing conversion therapy, and was attended by semi-mythological druids along with a community of artists and activists wearing hand-made costumes. According to Alex Farquharson, director of Tate Britain and chair of the Turner prize,  the artists 'bring a sense of humour, pleasure, joy, hope and hospitality—often through absurdism, camp, theatre—to an otherwise very tense situation.”

I publish here a brief conversation with members of Array Collective discussing their work. I spoke with Array members Thomas Wells, Alessia Cargnelli and Emma Campbell.

Array Collective, The Druithaib’s Ball, 2021. Photo by Ciara McMullan

Can you tell me a little bit more about your working process? How do you go about project development, project leadership?

Thomas Wells

A lot of the work kind of stems from a sense of humor that we all share and a similar sense of wanting to disrupt or piss off the establishment. We were asked in 2019 to formalize those ideas in an exhibition we did as a collective for a project in London, and it was the first time that we really had to come together and self-organize as a collective in a more formal way.

Let’s talk about carnivals— more specifically, on the term “carnivalesque”, a Mikhail Bakhtin term, something that he associates with the qualities of eccentricity, the strengthening of relations between people, profanation, and mainly the subversion of hierarchies. This subversion is often expressed through performance and as you know it reverts back to medieval times. In its modern form it is similar to Halloween in the United States, the opportunity for everyone to be a performance artist for a day.  Can you talk about the process by which you can instigate, inspire, or use the medium of the festival / the carnival, in your work and in your work with others?  

Thomas Wells

Basically the idea of Halloween [comes from it being] an Irish festival. We use folklore imagery within our practice to highlight more contemporary concerns. One of the characters that we developed as part of the enterprise work was this púca. The púca is a shapeshifting entity within Irish folklore—a really important motif that runs through a lot of folklore that you see across Europe into Asia and into America. There's [a view] that that's what we are doing with these performances. [But mainly] the elements of folklore that we use are incredibly important to highlight a forgotten Irish, pre-Christian history as well.

Array Collective, The Druithaib’s Ball, 2021. Photo by Ciara McMullan

Emma Campbell

We all did a little bit of homework where we would each bring stories. A lot of [those stories] were elements of Irish folklore and in a way that is political, especially in the north of Ireland where a lot of the old Irish culture was being purposely stamped out by the British for such a long time. [Last year marked the]  hundred years of the partition of Ireland... And there were a lot of celebrations in the north organized for that, but not everybody wants to celebrate it. 

It's very contentious here [given] the role of poets, dreads and clients, even in ancient Irish culture, were very close to the Kings. There were lots of Kings all over in the different counties, and they had a role to unseat the king if they told satire about them or made fun of the king in a terrible way. So I think the characters we all came up with, there were nine, I think, in total, including the púca. All of them talking about something quite serious in depth, but some with absurdity and humor, and, in a way, poking at the big bear of British colonialism at the same time. Whether that was Catholicism and its relationship to women, whether that was just not even the British power that's the Catholic church power or whether it was talking about the generational trauma that arose from the conflict in Northern Ireland or whether it was talking about gender identity or reproductive rights or mental health each one of the characters did it, and did it with a little bit of humor, a little bit of absurdity and a little bit of melancholy as well.

Socially engaged art was in a certain way a response to the kind of work that was produced in the nineties, which was defined as Relational Aesthetics. There was very little engagement with the actual audience, and there was very little critical perspective inserted in the experiences that were produced.

I'm curious about whether you ensure that your participants know that they are merely joining a celebration– meaning, that the experience is also a critical reflection on deeper issues?

Alessia Cargnelli

When we started coming together as a group we were doing that without thinking about it. We were part of a protest or rally, or something that was already organized by other grassroots organizations in Belfast, such as Alliance for Choice, a LGBTQ+ organization… So in a way we were the participants, and we weren't really thinking of “enlightening” an audience in front of us. And it's very difficult to do that and maintain that authenticity. And we are trying to engage with participants and peers at different levels. 

For the Druithaib’s Ball we tried to involve as many people as possible in the making of the work, and as many activist friends as possible, particularly when we made the video that is part of the work. We created a sort of big party like a ball where most people participated in an actual living performance.

For the people that then visited the Druithaib's Ball in Coventry, you could participate in the work at different levels, and there were so many layers of understanding that it depended on how much you were interested in the work and how much time you wanted to spend in the installation. 

Emma Campbell

When people were invited to the ball, they knew that they were being invited as fellow artists or activists, and they were asked to come up with a costume that had something to do with the centenary. And they could interpret that any way that they wanted.  We took descriptions of people when they got there and they were invited to come up and perform a little bit like a drag ball, but also it was a reference to the fact that at certain times of the year in Ireland, Mummers visit your house– who come in different characters and each would tell a small tale. And so it was a little bit of a mixture of queer culture as well as folklore.

We did have a group of traditional Irish mummers there speaking in Irish as well as drag queens. And so, it was purposely trying to fuse those things, but also the awareness from the participants that they were part of this. 

Was there anything particularly surprising to you about how it all unfolded? Was there something unexpected that you did not anticipate would happen?

Thomas Wells

We were working in a very strange global environment with Covid, where a lot of people's mental health wasn't great. But we managed to really rally.

Alessia Cargnelli

The thing that I was most worried about was the outcome of the ball that we filmed and to make everybody feel involved and comfortable in that role.  So once that happened and, and we probably underestimated [it], it was such a great energy during the night.

Emma Campbell

We realized that English people [while] reading the work might not get all of the references to what we're talking about, and we decided that we would just be okay with that. We expected, I guess, to elicit more emotion, some of the songs are quite harrowing or there's some very quiet, serious and somber moments. There's one part that is an elegy to a dead friend as well. Some of it is quite heavy and we factored in the light bits in between on purpose. What surprised me was the emotional reactions I heard from people who'd never set foot on the island or Belfast. And the comments from people— for me that was the biggest surprise.