11.07.2025

This day last year we had an admin day. And let me tell you the backstage on this tour, the budget for example, is an artwork in and of itself. A stunning hidden artwork by Liliane Puthod (alright boss?🤘🫶👏👏) 

Let's pop the bonnet of this tour and show you what’s in there.

This tour was an artist-led initiative funded by The Arts Council of Ireland Touring of Work Scheme and with support from 12 partnering institutions. When we were co-curating the pit stops, organising collaborations, asking people on board, it was really important for us to make sure that people’s time was recognised and their creativity was properly financially supported. 

In ‘25 tour de force became a nomadic museum on a journey into the Otherworld through a series of collaborative pit stops, speculative flash fictions; vignettes that mark out points on the broader narrative. A series of mise-en-abyme, where stories are embedded in one-another. Cycles of apotheosis occur within the plot, proposing a generative, self-reflexive structure that harks to the orally disseminated storytelling traditions, material culture and intangible heritage of Ireland. Allegory, symbolism and metatextuality represent an intricate labyrinth, an evolving, circuitous structure that contains narrative rotations within the overall system, much like the revolutions of the crankshaft of the car itself. 

Liliane, a visual artist and myself, writer had donned a whole bunch of hats to create a mapped adventure that celebrated the vibrant activities that are happening all over this island, all the time. We were particularly interested in traveling to rural areas and seeing what people were up to. We arrived with the Renault 4 as a meeting point, a makeshift site for exchange and encounter. The drive here -  was to develop a sensitive, careful non-extractive methodology. We didn’t want to be arriving in places with one arm as long as the other, as they say. While we devised a meticulous itinerary, we also wanted to leave space to go off-road. So for this, we built in the Dtour element of tour de force, where we could have some flexibility if we encountered something special along the way. This in hindsight, was a real boon as it enabled us to collaborate and work with some incredible people on unexpected pit stops along the road. More on that as the days go by… 

So yes, this day last year we had an admin day. 

A bit about our backgrounds…while we are Liliane Puthod - visual artist and Ingrid Lyons - writer, we employed a varied skill set to get this tour on the road and keep it going. Beyond our respective fields of work, Liliane is practically a specialist Renault 4 mechanic now, with a graphic design degree as well as a background in literature…I have a visual art education and a passionate interest in traditional music (specifically south west Donegal fiddle UP DONEGAL). Both of us have worked in art admin for galleries and institutions as well as a whole slew of other jobs that we all know we need to do to hang in there and support ourselves to make the things we want to make.

We were also trying to maintain a balance between IRL and online circulation. tour de force was a journey into the Otherworld, excavating for objects of intangible heritage and material culture…and so our goal was to develop a network for social transmission - much like the passing on of oral histories here in Ireland.

Speaking of goals and real life community projects, we asked Gavin Fahy (1815fc) and Eddie Kendrick (City Rocker Quarterly) to do public engagement for the tour. In a makeshift office in Laois, we liaised with the two lads Gav in Dublin and Eddie en-route by bike and train, as they rounded up an audience for our…. round tower, cowboy themed, Acid Granny, horse balloons, elegant ballet, cèilidh dancing, Paddy Critchley-commissioned painting-unveiling, Kean Kavanagh special gig, burrito van, sculpture installation, local photographer taking drone shots, historically accurate Vikings and Normans sword fighting, hand-painted sign pitching, furniture moving, picnic organising, sunblock sharing fiasco….ALL ON THE HOTTEST DAY OF THE YEAR for Meanwhile Back at the Ruins. An absurdist Flann O'Brien type melange of histories layered and plotted in a labyrinthine narrative structure that would make Jorge Luis Borges proud…more on this tomorrow …