Somerset House Studios

Associate Artist Jennifer Walshe presents her project Aisteach, the fictional Avant-Garde Archive of Ireland. Recorded during the 2018 edition of Sonic Acts Academy, Amsterdam where Walche was performing and screening the film An Gléacht alongside Mario de Vega. Historical Documents of the Irish Avant-Garde is a fictional history of the musical avant-garde in Ireland which spans 187 years, and is housed at aisteach.org, the website of the Aisteach Foundation, a fictional organisation which purports to be ”The Avant-Garde Archive of Ireland.” For the project, Walshe engaged a huge team of collaborators and created compositions, recordings, scores, articles and ephemera. An Gléacht Outsider artist Caoimhín Breathnach (1934–2009) lived as a recluse in the Irish village of Knockvicar for all of his life. Breathnach’s artistic practice focussed on the creation of ‘subliminal’ tapes and films, which he believed possessed the capacity to shift consciousness. In these works, Ogham magickal scales, crystallography,