22.07.2025

This day last year we received some good news; we got a slot on the radio to talk about tour de force - about six or seven minutes to contextualise the tour, explain it, publicise it. But the simple interview format quickly escalated into a series of complex metanarratives, expanding and spinning outwards simultaneously over several days and myriad townlands. Luke Clancy of Culture File - RTÉ lyric fm would interview us, whilst we concurrently invited him onto our DIY broadcast set-up via the gaming app Twitch, where he would join us for a live show of his own interview, which would take place while we were on the road…on a country lane in west Cork, with patchy coverage. Our tech rehearsals were throwing us into a state of disarray and pixilation and compounding the pre-existing nervousness ahead of the radio interview, but we were spurred on by the challenge and Luke’s enthusiasm for the experiment.

Back in June ‘25 in the lead up to the tour we’d received the following advice,

Keep it simple

This we did not do, not once. It became a running joke during the tour as we could never resist a tangent or detour, constant ornamentation and elaboration of ideas. The distant advice echoed across the mountain tops Keep it simple 🗣️ ⛰️ ⛰️ ⛰️

Simple simple simple…🌕🌖🌗🌘🌑🌒🌓

Perhaps this is what defines or activates tour de force as an artwork – a forty-five day, ever expanding durational performance on the road,

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. 

In the making of tour de force, ideas from the pilot tour across France in 2024 merged with a writing and curating phase in January 2025. Fuelled by the excitement of working with people we deeply admire, our plans constantly intensified. Collaborations became increasingly baroque, with additions, tangents, detours happening on the road, in real time. A bit like Jack Kerouac’s, On the Road…but sans the misogyny - take Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, and replace them with Thelma and Louise.The expressionist, energetic drive; uphill, downhill, the restlessness, the wanderlust - to keep moving no matter what. Fictions and non-fictions, intertwined with artworks, artefacts and encounter to create a labyrinthine adventure, a living Roman à clef / autofiction.

In 1951, Jack Kerouac typed out the legendary manuscript of On the Road over a twenty day period at an appartement in New York after his travels were over. In order to keep his flow, he taped long strips of architects' and Japanese tracing paper together to form a 120-foot scroll. Our own attempt at creating a stream of consciousness flow was to build a collection of mementos, objects, documents, recordings or soundscapes that could be pieced back together afterwards. A flow of fragments pooling together.

Technological glitches during radio interview trials and rehearsals reached epic proportions and generated a script research segway, culminating in a comedy of errors for our auto-reflexive, mis-en-abyme, worlds within worlds, constellation of microcosms interview for Culture File. We will share this with you in the near future….