13.07.2025
The day after, Meanwhile Back at the Ruins we headed towards Co. Carlow. This was the first long stretch of journey so we spent most of the day driving along at a steady pace and listening to music, mostly the dub poet, Linton Kwesi Johnson on that particular day. We set up the Twitch live stream and played cassettes on a Renault Blaupunkt Audio 3000 that we fitted as part of an experimental live broadcast project within tour de force called K7 dans la 4L (Cassettes in the Renault Quatrelle). Our intention was to broadcast our travels daily, including chats, music and unexpected encounters.
Looking out the small window from low seats, onto the bonnet and beyond gave the feeling of being inside a game. This is something that was ongoing for both tour de force and the pilot journey across France in 2024 ahead of Beep Beep – each became a kind of game, a mapped adventure with pit stops and detours. Much like Forza Horizon, a game that Liliane had played over a few months in 2023, she’d unlocked a seasonal level and discovered an abandoned wreck of an old Renault 4 in a barn. In the game you can restore the cars and rally them around the tracks, go off road, through the fields and onto tiny back lanes as well as taking part in races and rallies. This was emulated in real life for both the pilot in France in 2024 and last year for tour de force. It was like a real life video game. In this way tour de force was moving between real and synthesised worlds.
The Twitch set up was incredibly DIY with Liliane’s phone taped to the window with gaffer tape, and a cigarette lighter (see pics), and we’d frequently go out of coverage. But for the most part, the system worked; we’d found a way to set the system up to record and archive the journey whilst we moved through it bringing people from all over the world into the game with us. Initially, during the tour across France, we were streaming all day while we were on the road, using it as a way to stay connected with family and friends, though each day, new viewers tuned in to chat and pass the time with us. We drove across France and up through Ireland on a quest to get the recently re-animated car to The Pumphouse in Dublin port for Beep Beep, a major installation by Liliane, curated by Temple Bar Gallery + Studios in summer 2024.
I had the fiddle with me so sometimes I was playing tunes inside the car too. From this, I made a series of compositions, small pieces of music responding to different mechanisms under the bonnet, and the Beep Beep journey as a whole to create a sort of game soundtrack. These compositions on zither and fiddle were later incorporated into a performance and cassette project called Tuam Na Farraige, in collaboration with music and art collective, Metaxu.
For tour de force, we were on a quest to visit artists, musicians, mechanics, farmers, archaeologists, craftspeople, academics and aficionados over a series of pit stops all around Ireland. The musical element of the tour was important and throughout, we collaborated with musicians working across different mediums and genres who featured in live streamed concerts. Over the 45 day trip, K7 dans la 4L also hosted recitals inside the Renault 4 and played a variety of cassettes as well as music sourced from the collection of Irish Traditional Folk Music Archive. With genre meandering mix tapes and a growing collection of releases from underground labels, this broadcasting experiment became an ever growing cabinet of sonic curiosities. Driving from place to place, live broadcasts of conversation, atmospheric sound, interviews and music experiments, formedsoundscapes for the IRL game, as the Renault 4 moved through the landscape.
Photo credits: tour de force, Michael Hill and Ros Kavanagh.
12.07.2025
When Fiction Lives in Fiction the 1939 essay by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges considers metanarrative in At Swim-Two-Birds, a 1939 novel by Irish writer Brian O'Nolan, writing under the pseudonym Flann O’Brien…
At Swim-Two-Birds is not only a labyrinth; it is a discussion of the many ways to conceive of the Irish novel and a repertory of exercises in prose and verse which illustrate or parody all the styles of Ireland. The magisterial influence of Joyce (also an architect of labyrinths, also a literary Proteus) is undeniable, but not disproportionate in this manifold book. Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that dreaming and wakefulness are the pages of a single book, and that to read them in order is to live, and to leaf through them at random, is to dream. Paintings within paintings and books that branch into other books help us sense this oneness.
The tour de force Co. Laois pit stop was curated in collaboration with visual artist Paddy Critchley, in partnership with Dunamaise Arts Centre. A day of mountain views, fresh air, Laois singer Kean Kavanagh; The County Star, national monuments and burritos, cowboys, storytelling, historically accurate Vikings and hermits. Amongst the ruins, painter, singer and Laois native Paddy Critchley unveiled a specially commissioned work, a hand painted decal for the bonnet of the Renault 4, with the word Capaill, the Irish word for horse, underneath. Site responsive performances from Acid Granny Hoors of Ireland ensued. A banquet artwork, picnic by Liliane Puthod, with paper party plates and handmade, glazed ceramic replicas threw the day into sensorial disorientation as objects seemed to melt off the ruins onto the grass beneath. A number of hand painted signs by Paddy guided people through the village and the ruins, between realms of reality and fiction, wakefulness and dream. In the hills of Co. Laois…..the Renault 4 drifted into another world of music, art, poetry, and song through satire, surrealism, and wit…presenting a melange of mingling and clashing narrative rotations.
Artworks within artworks, worlds within worlds, history, fiction, reality melting together, Meanwhile Back at the Ruins was a music, theatre, performance, fine art, dance picnic at what is widely believed to be Ireland’s most beautiful and well preserved round tower, in a townland with a dense and expansive history.
Timahoe is about 12 km south of Portlaoise on the R426 regional road, and the name comes from saint Mochua - Tigh Mochua: 'House of Mochua' an abbot who founded the original monastic settlement on the site in the 7th century. Prior to the introduction of the modern regional road numbering system, the part of the road linking Portlaoise and Castlecomer was also named after Mochua – the old name for the road being Timahaun Road. This stretch of road passes residential areas and auto centres, as well as a number of historic sites including the round tower.
According to a plaque at the heritage centre beside the tower, Mochua spent his time alone with only his three pets for company. The rooster, mouse and fly were said to accompany him everywhere and help him in his routine. Local folklore has it that the rooster woke Mochua early each morning, the mouse rested on his shoulder and nibbled his ear if he nodded off whilst reading, and the fly walked along each line so he would never lose his place in the text.
Norsemen attacked and burned the monastery in the early 10th century, an event that was officially recorded in the Annals of the Four Masters after which the round tower was built at some point in the 12th century. In the 17th century, British colonial figure Oliver Cromwell issued a declaration on the 27th April 1652, placing a bounty on the head of every wolf. And the last wolf in Ireland was hunted down and killed in the area during the 18th century. In 1786, on a mountain near the tower in Timahoe, the last Mac Tíre, son of the land was killed; the wolf systemically eradicated and the Irish wilderness decimated.
for every bitch wolfe, six pounds; for every dogg wolfe, five pounds; for every cubb which prayeth for himself, forty shillings; for every suckling cubb, ten shillings; and no woolfe after the last of September until the 10th of January be accounted a young woolfe, and the commissioners of the revenue shall cause the same equallie assessed within their precincts.
In the 20th century, in the wake of British colonial rule, County Laois reclaimed its ancient Gaelic name 400 years after the name of Queen’s County was established during the Tudor plantations of the 16th century.
We chose the 12th of July for Meanwhile Back at the Ruins because it seemed as good a day as any to host a carnivalesque romp celebrating the defiance of language and tradition in post-colonial Laois. The sun cast a long shadow across the green while people paraded and danced on the hottest day of the year and later a group of traditional musicians gathered for a session of Irish music and song.
In the evening the coaches returned to take people back to the train station.
Photo credits: Film camera photos @ Feá McCoy. Others by Terry Conroy, and tour de force.
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 …
10.07.2025
The second day of the tour was another scorcher. Blue skies all around. We had booked into our accommodation in Portlaoise, and chatting to the receptionist the following morning, we heard that temperatures were going to climb towards 29°C in the coming days in Laois. This marked the beginning of an official nationwide heatwave that saw temperatures surpass 27°C on multiple consecutive days across Ireland.
Both Liliane and myself were inclined to take the morning at a slow pace - we’d been working through a few calamities in the lead up do the departure event including,
- A stressful last-minute venue change for our event in Timahoe
- Liliane moving out of her studio and having to pack and store everything
- A narrow window to get the sound system and other technical equipment installed for the special broadcast and live Twitch element of the tour. (The lads at Radio King 👑 basically knuckled down for 7 hours until the job was done, fair play to them. We drank coffee and enjoyed the playlist…Ugg'a/AMG Showtime dance remixes of Kylie Minogue's iconic 2001 hit, ‘Can't Get You Out of My Head’ in an industrial estate in Finglas).
- Bringing a load of stuff to the dump after Liliane cleared out her studio, I’d taken a few items that Liliane was otherwise going to sell on Adverts. Then I went over a speed bump and the weight of a fairly large vice in the boot caused the wishbone to snap as my Colt’s suspension was pushed to the max.
- This meant we had to hire a van to finish what we were doing, driving down the country conducting last-minute site visits due to the last-minute venue change.
- Liliane had to pack the Renault 4 alone with all that we’d need for 6 weeks because I had just one day to get to Sligo, pack and get back in time for the start of the tour.
- Then I had to collect 30 promised croissants for a coffee morning whilst carrying a fiddle, amp, suitcase and large box of cassettes from Connelly Station to Temple bar after a night drive to bring my repaired Colt back up to Sligo only to get the 5am train back to Dublin the following morning.
Anyway, all that to say we were relieved to get to Laois and relax for a bit so we decided to visit the Rock of Dunamase. We took the N80 (Stradbally Road) for about 4 km. Then took that turn left at the signpost for the Rock of Dunamase onto an unnamed local rural road marked L6751. Pity the way they do that instead of having original names of the roads as gaeilge. We parked up with a nice view of the rock and looked up its history. I had been given the gift of one of my all-time favourite albums on cassette, so we put that on. Paddy Glackin on fiddle and Jolyon Jackson on about twenty different instruments to create the wildly experimental and brilliant album, Hidden Ground.
The name Dunamase comes from the Irish Dún Másc, meaning the Fort of Masc. Over centuries, it evolved from an ancient Celtic fort and Viking target into an Anglo-Norman castle before being destroyed during the Cromwellian invasion in the mid-1600s. In the mid 90s a series of archaeological excavations were carried out and over 5,500 objects were recovered.
At around 2pm we headed for Dunamaise Arts Centre to prepare for our talk, Roads Less Travelled…
In conversation with writer Ingrid Lyons, visual artist Liliane Puthod introduces her sculpture practice with a focus on her recent exhibition ‘Beep Beep’.
‘Beep Beep’ was curated and produced by Temple Bar Gallery and Studios as part of Longest Way Round, Shortest Way Home, two off-site solo exhibitions at The Pumphouse, Dublin Port, in partnership with Dublin Port Company and supported by The Arts Council of Ireland Project Award.
With the car parked outside Dunamaise Art Centre, we’d invited people to come and hear about the background of tour de force as a touring iteration of Beep Beep and how the Renault 4 would become a mobile museum and broadcasting unit for the summer. At that stage we weren’t sure who was going to show up as we hadn’t seen the attendees list yet. Visual artist and Laois native Paddy Critchley arrived for the talk as well as a few others from the town. Then, low and behold a large group arrived, a youth group who were carrying out their own project on themes of travel and transience, home and sense of belonging. They’d booked in and made a day trip out of our talk.
….at a certain time you might think something doesn't have value, or in that moment you don't maybe see its use. But then as time goes on the object re-emerges from obsolescence or finds a new use. Some people hold on to things, knowing that there’ll be a use for them eventually, they gather the objects and bring them back to their former glory. So in the spirit of that, Liliane became a mechanic and worked with three friends of her late father, the legendary mechanics David, Alain and Christophe to re-animate the Renault 4.
Later on, Liliane and myself went for a few beers in the sun and then hit the dance floor of the local pub/club Coppers on the Market Square.
09.07.2025
This day last year we hit the road for a tour around Ireland … at the wheel of Liliane’s late father’s Renault 4, tour de force was a celebration of culture and creativity in the format of a mapped adventure engaging with artists, musicians, mechanics, farmers, archaeologists, craftspeople, academics and aficionados over a series of pit stops all around Ireland…a summer 2025 ‘buddy movie’.
For our departure event at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios we were joined by James Collins, one of Ireland’s last remaining traditional Traveller tinsmiths, who demonstrated the making of a poncher (mug). He sat by the car working on the tin mug and talking a bit about the objects he’d created over the years; billy-cans, pails, coal scuttles and a barrel top caravan he’d made with the use of string for taking measurements.
James with his friend, Michael ‘Gig’ Collins, discussed the challenges of passing on skills, knowledge, Intangible heritage, the rising cost of tin and copper and the scarcity of tools that were once widely available. Tin smithing became commercially obsolete between the 1960s and 1970s with the introduction of cheap, factory-made plastics and mass-produced goods in Ireland. From a vocational trade to a specialist craft in half a century.
James hammered and shaped a sheet of tin throughout and gave us a poncher, as well as a beautiful copper coal scuttle - good luck charms for the road ahead.
After the event at TBG+S, we left in the car to collect Barry Kehoe at IMMA and we all hit the road on the R110 (Old Naas Road), which transitions into the R445 at Naas. Another factor in this tour was that we were staying off motorways completely. The weather was scorching that day. With Barry in the Car, we set up the live Twitch and streamed some cassettes and chats until we reached Kilcullen. Barry had organised a meeting there with a family who’ve been the custodians of Dan Donnelly’s mummified arm for several generations. Dan Donnelly, born March 1788, was a professional boxing pioneer and the first Irish-born heavyweight champion. We were shown the arm outside a garage in Kilcullen and later we got to see the archive that had amassed over the years; photographs, articles and mementos. Graverobbers were initially responsible for the mummified arm moving independently from its resting place at Bully’s Acre, Kilmainham, though after, the arm was displayed in the Hideout public house in Kilcullen, for four decades from 1953. During the 2000s the arm was exhibited in New York, Boston, in Omagh, Co. Tyrone and Croke Park, Dublin.
We took some photos with the arm, us holding it and then the arm beside the fiddle and on the Renault 4 to give a sense of scale. Difficult to convey its length, even with the reference to these other objects.
After taking some photos together and with the arm, we left to drop Barry to the train station. However… we’d left very little time for the journey, since hearing about the mummified arm and seeing its archive had been so fascinating. We essentially needed nothing to go wrong now since this was the last train for the evening. As we drove along at no more than 40km/hr towards the train station, Barry’s worry was palpable so we gave him a Seamus Heaney poem to read out for the live Twitch stream with people tuning in.
Barry read The Tollund Man and we missed a turn as we’d all become distracted, thinking about the bog man in Aarhus and the experience we’d just had. The missed turn threw an extra two minutes onto the trip according to Google Maps but for us, that would be about three and a half or four minutes in the R4.
Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eye-lids,
His pointed skin cap…
Liliane was booting it now and Barry was finishing out the poem with great conviction. Somehow, Liliane managed to bring the car up to the speed of 60km/hr and we made it into the station a minute before the train was due, Barry lept out of the car and ran towards the platform and we waited there to receive a confirmation text. Happily, the train was four minutes late and Barry had a moment to relax on the platform and send a text before he boarded. We then left and headed towards Dunamaise that evening.
Photo credits: tour de force, Serhii Shapoval, Brian Byrne.