The Critical Drinking Curriculum
“Alcohol is no longer just a drink for me. It is always a social and political substance.” - Vita Buivid
The “Critical Drinking Curriculum” is an ongoing program that enquires into alcohol’s global political entanglements. The project looks at alcohol as a political substance and a place of intersection for the relationship between the body and the State. It thinks it from the scope of race, gender, class and age, between others; considering how the historical production, trade and consumption of alcohol, together with the cultural codes surrounding these practices, entangle themselves with global politics. The curriculum opens up this entanglement by doing an artistic enquiry into some of the different histories of alcohol production, trade and drinking. The “Critical Drinking Curriculum” takes the form of a cognitive map that delineates local histories’ relation to the global through the everyday object of alcohol as a prism.
Smashed: Speaking Histories of Insurrection
SMASHED: Speaking Histories of Insurrection enquires into the Irish pub as a political space for community building, transmission of oral history and anti-colonial organising within the context of the long British colonial occupation of Ireland.
The work is a sonic collage of conversations with Michelle Turley, Pádraigín O’Flynn, Ian Nolan and Niall O’Flynn on the space created around the practice of collective drinking, and its relation to the disavowal of and organisation against an oppressive colonial regime. The research on the collective memories of Ireland’s colonisation and resistance is approached through storytelling and the re-telling of personal and family histories deeply entrenched in this history.
The space of the pub becomes the prism into this research due to drunkenness’ close relationship to the transmission of oral history. This is of particular importance in the Irish context due to its long history under colonial rule, where official written history was controlled by the British — drunk oral history becoming, thus, a possible space for insurgency.
What place does the pub occupy within the social fabric? In what ways can the pub be a space of learning? How do the voices of the oppressed move through and around a system of violent silencing? In what ways does drunk speech escape discipline? What are the ways in which one listens? What does contagious singing have to do with collective political activation? Is there a direct relation between higher alcohol consumption and political despair?
An audio piece by Hannah O’Flynn interviewing Michelle Turley, Pádraigín O’Flynn, Ian Nolan & Niall O'Flynn.Sound design & post-production by Pablo Giménez Arteaga.Drunk Letters
The Drunk Letters publication was brought together by Vita Buivid and Hannah O’Flynn under the Critical Drinking Curriculum presentation at Juxtapose Art Fair.
The publication contains a selection of submissions by Margo van de Linde, Eric Anderson, Ian Nolan, Vita Buivid, Natalia Papaeva, Niall O’Flynn, Joana Cuiko and Michelle Turley.
