Small Stories: Engaging Cultural Memory with Contemporary Language

Artists often give voice to marginalised communities and resist the cultural threats accompanying globalisation, dominant markets, popular narratives, technological change, and shifting political attitudes.
This project highlights the importance of language on two levels. First, it considers the impact of indigenous language loss on the preservation of local folklore and cultural heritage. The disappearance of language-specific forms of expression diminishes cultural richness more broadly. Second, it addresses the development and recognition of artistic research, the expressive benefits of interdisciplinary collaboration, and the role of artistic language in public-facing and cross-disciplinary communication.
The presentation explores the first issue through the collaborative practice of Paul Green and Tomasz Madajczak, focusing on work in the Irish-speaking regions of Cape Clear (Oileán Chléire) and the Muskerry Gaeltacht (Gaeltacht Mhúscraí) in County Cork. Madajczak responds to the cultural pressures of island life on Cape Clear through conventional and interpretive film approaches. Green draws on oral folklore collected in the early 1940s in the Muskerry Gaeltacht, developing short VR narratives narrated in Irish. These works re-engage a local oral tradition at risk due to demographic change.
The language of artistic research is also examined as potentially vulnerable within a contemporary academic landscape where funding increasingly depends on cross-cultural and interdisciplinary partnerships. Drawing on three additional recent collaborations, alongside the project introduced above, the presentation identifies the conceptual and communicative challenges inherent in such work. It also examines related research initiatives on artistic collaboration between the Faculty of Creative and Performing Arts and Media and the Nimbus Research Center at Munster Technological University, funded by Research Ireland and TU RISE.