Three acts of exchange: A performance by Theo Hynan-Ratcliffe and Parmenides

A collaborative project developed by Theo Hynan-Ratcliffe and Parmenides in relation and dialogue with the landscape and matter of Co. Clare. The project weaves fiction, music and field recordings from sacred sites on the Burren in Co. Clare where many of the materials and cast objects are collected and made. The field recordings of stones, insects, wind and water from the Burren are used to create the foundation and rhythm of the work. 

This performance will be the third iteration of this project and presents three acts of exchange between body and place as the protagonist encounters a disappearing lake, tries to change their accent by drinking down the knowledge of place contained in foraged and homemade cordials, and spends a night sleeping out in the stones in order for the sale of her land to go through, in order to become from place. Accompanied by live music and field recordings devised and performed by Parmenides. The protagonist will tell us stories of these exchanges while making a series of clay casts of the interior of hagstones, these casts of hagstones will go on to be fired and incorporated into new iterations of this work. 

The work asks; how do you become from a place? how do you prove belonging to place? is place preserved in the bodies of matter produced there? Proposing the myth that through the consumption of physical matter from a place you can become of and from the site of the matter. 

Performers: 

Parmenides: Originally from Chicago, but now residing in Co. Clare, Parmenides is a musician and sound artist currently exploring soundscapes and experimental folk music inspired by their relationship to spirituality and being, to others, and to the land we live on.

@parmenides_music

Theo Hynan-Ratcliffe: A sculptor and writer from Co. Clare currently based in Limerick city. Her sculptural and written works focus on practices of visiting, re-visiting, foraging, collecting, physicalising memory and qualities of time through casting, touch and making, through holding, reproducing, boiling, reducing, drying, watching sediment settle, and moving matter from liquid to solid states and sometimes back again. 

Her work proposes a reimaging of stones as vibrant, vital and mortal beings, and gently plays with the precarity of the housing crisis, the climate crisis, and the figure of the blow-in. She proposes an attunement to more-than-human matter and the knowledge held in matter’s bodies. She asks you to consider the cultural relation of place and consumable materials, thinking about the appetite to belong, to hold the knowledge of matter and social memories of a place within you, to move from outside to inside the skin of place.

@theo_hynanratcliffe_