WHAT MATTERS?

ev+a returns this year with a new preoccupation and theme MATTERS: spaces, places, old, new, derilect and reclaimed, form, function and folklore. As Ireland’s preeminent art exhibition prepares for opening on March 12 L.E.G looks forward to ev+a returning to the heart of the city centre with a new hub on Thomas Street / Catherine Street.

As a collaboration among artists, curators, sponsors, workers and committee members, e v+ a annually presents to its audiences in Limerick the best of contemporary art for assessment, to promote understanding and engender celebration of the contemporary culture that surrounds us.

The artists exhibiting and participating in ev+a are selected through two forums:

OPEN ev+a is the yearly submission exhibition, open to all artists working through any materials, mediums, styles, genres, practices and concepts. This year’s curator, Elizabeth Bonde Hatz of Sweden, has selected artwork from the submissions received and has designed and placed these pieces within the formal and off site spaces for ev+a in Limerick city centre. Bonde Hatz also determines the ev+a awards and contributes to the exhibition catalogue essay.

INVITED e v+ a occurs every other year when the curator personally invites artists of international standing to participate and includes their work as a counterpoint to OPEN ev+a. 2010 is one such year.

This year’s Curator: Elizabeth Bonde Hatz / SWEDEN

Hatz is an architect and Professor of Architecture at KTH, the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. She has taught at SAUL School of Architecture, University of Limerick since the school was established in 2006. She adds, “I practice architecture and was born with art. The two are from the beginning inter-twined and mutually fertilising. I divide my time-space between Sweden and Ireland, between Stockholm and Limerick.”

As head of the Swedish Association of Architects in 93-94, Hatz is a co-founder of Fargfabriken, the internationally renowned polestar for Art and Architecture in Stockholm with a new satellite venue in Östersund, in the north of Sweden. She has been an active member of the board since 1995 staging exhibitions of work from Maurizio Cattelan, Carsten Höller, Jan Håfström, Moment Ginza, Gunilla Leander, Mike & Doug Starn: Gravity of Light, Brion Gysin: INFLUENCE, The Expanded Book, Bo I. Cavefors, as well as events like Stockholm at Large.

Hatz leads a project within the Government funded “Artistic Research within Architecture” at KTH, within the AKAD, the Academy of practice-based research in Architecture and Design. Her work was exhibited at Fargfabriken in 2004, at the Art & Science Festival 2005 and at Lund Art Hall in 2006, with the AKAD event “Beginnings”. She has evaluated Practice based research at Aarhus, Denmark.

Her writings such as Architecture Ireland; Love Letter to the Island of Desire have been published in Sweden, UK and Ireland. Performances include “Dark Light – Architectural Wanderings”, a video performance at Lund City Hall at the Culture Night 1994 and at the symposium “Form Follows Anything,” Fargfabriken 1996. Hatz curated the exhibition “The Dream Museum” at the National Museum in Stockholm and designed the international exhibition “Traces of Congo” which toured the four Scandinavian capitals from the Ethnographic Museum in Stockholm to the National Museum of Copenhagen 2002-2007.

Hatz was on the board of Eva Bonnier Art Fund and headed the jury for the Kalmar Stortorg competition in 2004, won by artist Eva Löfdahl Stockholm and architects Caruso & St John London. She is currently on the Strategic Board of The National Museum in Stockholm. She was elected member of the Royal Academy of Agriculture and Forestry of Sweden as a result of her work for LRF Culture Board and the exhibition “Geometry of Milk” in 2003.

What Matters to the Curator for ev+a 2010?

“Limerick has grown on me – I have become attached to it, because I cannot make it out. It is not charming – it is irresistible. It’s a city of contradictions and conflicts, the most segregated of places in Ireland, physically and mentally. It is rough and gentle in the weirdest mix. Planned for the car, fragmented and smashed apart and left with a truly lovable – neglected and dying – city centre, truffled with great little butcher shops. It defies 21st century idea of urbanity and urban living by the persistent and perplexing presence of animals; sheep and cows, rare birds, horses pulling sulkies in the middle of the streets or grazing impediments within the road spaghetti. Both invisible and highly physical walls cut across the city, pulling neighbourhoods far apart. Remnants of crashed Celtic Tiger Dreams stand like monuments with their halted cranes and half finished towers. In many ways, Limerick is like a miniature image of current conditions, displaying in a single glimpse the passionate absurdities and restraining certitudes. Limerick is longing to be seen.”

For the OPEN / INVITED e v+ a mapping work done during past summer by The Intelligence Unit at SAUL, University of Limerick will be made available and offered as factual material on the city and its region for those who wish to find out more about the place in which e v+ a 2010 will take place.

The annual ev+a bus tour leaves Thomas Street / Catherine Street corner on Saturday March 13^th at 12pm visiting all 11 ev+a sites.

SpiritStore CAT DIG at ev+a 2010 | A weekend of events on Catherine Street| Friday May 7^th – Sunday 9^th 2010

The Spiritstore returns as part of ev+a 2010. This working art group presents The Catherine Street Culture Dig, a project positioning the street as an artform. The street’s residents and traders are participating with The SpiritStore as instigators of a series of cultural events. To realise this, SpiritStore and the Catherine Street traders and residents have held weekly meetings in various street venues to broker links between creative practitioners and the spaces offered by Catherine Street.

The result of this process will be a weekend of events - CAT DIG. The programme will include elements of experimental music, dance, theatre performances, workshops, film projections, writing, drawing clubs, a twitter treasure hunt as well as many other events to be announced.

The weekend will begin on Friday May 7th at 5.30 and finish at 5.30 on Sunday 9th. To introduce SpiritStore’s’ Catherine Street Cultural Dig we will be serving the traditional Limerick dish Packet and Tripe as part of ev+a’s tour from the corner of Thomas St and Catherine Street on Saturday March 13 at 6pm.

It will be served free and accompanied by excerpts read from Mike Finn’s Limerick play, ‘Pigtown’. A film of tales and times associated with the dish from a generation of Limerick women who prepared, and still prepare, the meal for themselves and their families will be screened in the space during the event.

The inspiration to present this unique Limerick recipe in this manner was reference to the continuous presence in the city centre of family butchers, the social history of Limerick as Pigtown and of course the ever present meat processing tales of Catherine Street.

To keep up to date with ongoing details on this collaborative project visit www.spiritstorelimerick.blogspot.com or keep an eye on the noticeboard outside French’s café on the corner of Catherine Street and Roches Street.

Packet & Tripe Recipe

Packet and Tripe is a real Limerick city dish. The whitish part, Tripe, is the lining of the cow’s stomach and the blue-balckish packet is a varietal of pigs blood pudding. It is very easily digested. They say packet and tripe should only be eaten if the letter “r” appears in the spelling of the month.

Ingredients

* 1lb tripe

* ½lb packet

* 2-3 onions, diced

* 1 pint water

* 3/4 pint of full-fat milk

* large knob of butter

* salt and pepper

Preparation

• Rinse the tripe in running water, and cut into small 1cm-2cm squares.
• Add the tripe to a pint of boiling water, and simmer for ½ hour to 1 hour, until the tripe is tender.
• Drain the tripe, add to the pot with the milk, and the diced onions. Bring to the boil.
• Remove the skin from the packet. Dice it into small cubes and add it to the pot. Simmer for 30 minutes, then spoon into a bowl.

Serve with a large knob of butter, salt & pepper and enjoy.

Limerick historian and scholar Jim Kemmy Jim Kemmy wrote, “Packet and tripe, washed down with strong sweet tea has been found to be easily digestible and rests gently on the stomach, especially one ravaged by an excess of alcohol. For this reason the dish is very much in demand after a weekend “feed of porter” has rendered the stomach hostile to other forms of nourishment Packet and tripe is reputed to give a “lining” to the stomach so the dish has been traditionally been a weekend treat, a distintive Saturday night/Sunday morning ritual.”

The opening of the ev+a will take place on the evening of 12^th March at the LSAD Gallery, Limerick School of Art & Design, Clare Street. This year’s exhibition will feature the work of over 42 OPEN artists and 16 INVITED artists installed in more than 11 venues throughout Limerick City. For details on the artists, OPEN & INVITED, participating in ev+a 2010 please visit www.eva.ie