Third Space Galway (est. 2014) is an interdisciplinary eco social arts research collective, a community permaculture project space for regenerative culture, critical reflection and creative practice.
Set up to bridge strands of contemporary creative practice and community action, through an inter-disciplinary exchange of ideas and creative working methodologies, our current objective is to foster and cultivate a deeper awareness of eco-social arts practices and eco literacy understanding to all aspects of contemporary life and culture. Our collective efforts work towards manifesting in partnership with others a creative platform for regenerative culture, action research, participative and socially engaged practices, specifically addressing climate change, ecological collapse, community resilience, sustainable and regenerative living.
‘Emerging Futures’ Convergence Event 2015
Our work practices reflects our concerns in establishing creative platforms, to facilitate various conversations, collaborations and exchanges between different ways of thinking, doing and being, the polycultures of people and place, sharing and moving between local skills and specialist knowledge.Current projects aim to explore local collaborative pathways to a more equitable, democratic and low carbon Galway, by working creatively and collectively in codesigning sustainable and regenerative living spaces and practices, including sites for regenerative agri/culture and food production, adaptation and regenerative cultural design.
Third Space…
‘as Lived Space is portrayed as multi-sited and contradictory, oppressive and liberating, passionate and routine, knowable and unknowable.
It is a space of radical openness, a site of resistance and struggle, a space of multiplicitious representations (…) It is a meeting ground, a site of hybridity. ….
Projects (as thirdspaces ) clearly produce place as it is practised and lived; they provide a space of interrelations, always in the process of being made and remade, not only materially but also socially.‘
…taken from Locating the Producers Durational Approaches to Public Art, by Paul O’Neill & Claire Doherty
“Deciding to be a research artist isn’t a tendency or a fashion; it’s not a curatorial strategy to display things in a space, but a way to see your responsibility in the practice of art and your role as an artist in society.”
Tania Bruguera
Third Space Galway aims to:
– Advance the skills, knowledge and possibility of creative practice in the fields of collaborative, political and socially engaged arts practice In Galway City and County
– Foster a space for creative arts engagement with the wider contexts of place and community in Galway by developing a centralised open platform from which to host ongoing research, embedded projects, public discussions, screenings and collaborative events
– House a small library that features a collection of contemporary art publications and research on regenerative, collaborative, participatory and socially engaged practices for the benefit of the local community
– Enhance local arts and cultural provision by providing local artists with the supportive and discursive environment they need to create critical, relevant and progressive engaged forms of art practice
– Further critical awareness of the potentially dynamic role of contemporary creative practice in relation to pressing social and environmental challenges
– Develop exchange and collaborative ventures with similar initiatives nationally and internationally
– Promote the centrality of arts, social justice and sustainability in local, regional, national and international policy-making.
