SMALL PRINT:MUTANT SPACE, an arts skills exchange co-operative that organises and facilitates events, is gearing up for Trash Culture Revue, a DIY festival taking part in Cork from Friday.
The festival features a “Mutant Shorts” film competition, storytelling, DJ sets, visual art exhibitions, a vegan-friendly tea party and a secret Bill Coleman gig, among other events.
The festival also features a talk from The Provisional University, an autonomous education project.
Trash Culture Revue takes place across several venues including Tom Barry’s bar, Sample Studios at the Old Fás Building and The Elysian.
Mutant Space itself operates on the basis of a skills exchange, where people can swap and pool their skills, and source other skills in order to gain creative and practical support and advice for an event or project.
By registering skills in a skills bank in the categories of creative, production, management and marketing and PR, Mutant Space acts as a free collaborative resource external to a cultural economy based on capital or funding. The site now has 1,500 members in eight countries who all provide their skills free of charge.
“All the events are programmed, performed and put together by members of our online skills exchange,” says Moray Bresnihan, creator of Mutant Space.
“People are coming from all over the country, they don’t know each other.”
Bresnihan says the festival – the fifth, run twice a year – is “a physical manifestation of the online idea, proving that it works.”
For more information on the Trash Culture Revue events, check out mutantspace.com.
Extended production: EP with a mag
BJÖRK PLOUGHED money into her Biophiliaapp, Radiohead printed a newspaper on the release of The King of Limbs, and now Dublin band Delorentos has come up with an interesting way to package its new EP.
Little Sparksis the title of a magazine the band has published in conjunction with the EP of the same name. The magazine itself is basically a standalone publication, worthy of being printed and indeed being read without the EP tucked into the back page, and focuses on creative individuals across the arts in Ireland.
Delorentos says the publication is an attempt “to shine a light on the work some of the people that we’ve worked with or that we like and respect but, more importantly, people that have managed to be creative in their chosen field of expression”.
It’s an eclectic mix, with actor Domhnall Gleeson, musician Jape, artivist Will St Leger, and comedy collective Diet of Worms among others, all explaining what they do and why they do it, alongside interviews with the band members themselves.
With bands increasingly experimenting with different methods of packaging music, Delorentos has gone a step further by creating a new product through which the sentiment of its music – creativity and independence – can be digested.
“They’re all doing different things,” Delorentos says of the people in the magazine, “but have one thing in common: they are trying their best, putting their all into what they do and doing their best to make whatever they do work in spite of all the hurdles.”
It’s an interesting move that digresses from the gimmicks that labels and bands are looking to in order to sell more units, and instead offering a supplementary product alongside the music itself.
The magazine isn’t for sale in shops, but will be available from five venues in Mullingar, Cork, Dublin, Letterkeny and Thurles the band is performing in from tomorrow as part of an acoustic tour.
