Terrapolis was a live performance event held on July 26, 2025 as part of Staying with the Trouble (May 2, 2025–September 21, 2025), an exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. It featured performances by artists Léann Herlihy, Sam Keogh, Bea McMahon, Venus Patel and Eoghan Ryan. It was co-curated by Mary Cremin, Rachael Gilbourne, Seán Kissane, Sara Damaris Muthi and Georgie Thompson. The exhibition responded to feminist philosopher Donna Haraway’s generative text Staying with the Trouble (2016) with works by forty Irish and Ireland-based artists exploring themes of Techno-Apocalypse, Critters, Making Kin, Composting and Sowing Worlds.[1] The curatorial inquiry of Terrapolis addressed Haraway’s concept of the same title which she proposes as “a story, a speculative fabulation, and a string figure for multispecies worlding” (2016: 10). Importantly, for Haraway, speculative fabulation is “a mode of attention, a theory of history, and a practice of worlding” (213). Arguably, this thread is woven throughout the performances of Terrapolis, aiming to represent what Haraway has called “a chimera of materials, languages, histories” (11).

Eoghan Ryan’s Circle A (2024) was staged outside within the arena of IMMA’s impressive courtyard. The former Royal Kilmainham Hospital – a site with deep imperial resonances – was a hospital and retirement home for British soldiers, where injured or failing male bodies received care in the aftermath of their military service to the British Empire. It was an aptly suited location for a work that considered systems, order and chaos. On the ground, the symbol for anarchy, a large Circle A, was chalked in white. The Circle A was derived from French political thinker Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s statement that “society seeks order through anarchy” (1840), (referenced in Finn 2021: 31). Within that symbol, the O signifies order while the A represents anarchy. Speakers were positioned at strategic points on the perimeter of the symbol and, beyond that, audience members were seated or stood. Three performers in short denim cutoffs, socks – one red, one black – and tap shoes, moved around the Circle A. Their black hooded sweatshirts were pulled up over their heads, partially covering their faces in a sinister fashion like a balaclava. Three performers walked in time, marched and danced around the symbol in different patterns and movements while a fourth performer, positioned behind a drum kit on a small platform, played the drums at different intervals.[2] The uniform tapping of the performers’ metal soles evoked military parades or soldiers marching in formation. Intermittently, a DJ at mixing decks isolated and stripped back key elements from John Lennon’s Come Together (1969) and Breakdown (1976) by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Come Together was originally written for the countercultural figure, American psychologist Timothy Leary, when he ran for office. It later became better known as an antiwar anthem. Breakdown is an ambiguous but emotional song about relationships. At times, the performers moved around the Circle A individually, as a duo, or, in unison. Conversely, the drum beats either punctuated the performers’ movements or struggled against them, representing both order and chaos. At its heart, this work addresses the different systems that we have imposed on our world to regulate and order it, posing questions about how we can engender systemic change while still upholding these systems.

The audience was navigated through Terrapolis under the precise guidance of compère Daisy Duvall, played by artist Venus Patel. Dressed in a white cutwork top and skirt, a bolero tie, a straw cowboy hat and cowboy boots, the fresh-faced Daisy conveyed all the trappings of a wholesome country girl. Patel reprised her performance from Daisy: Prophet of the Apocalypse (2023–2025), a work based on her experiences as a trans femme of colour negotiating her identity and position in the world.[3] Like a Christian street preacher warning that the excesses of the world lead to eternal damnation unless one repents, Daisy addressed another sort of salvation: that of a new queer world. She framed Terrapolis as “break[ing] away from the violent structures society has imposed on us”, urging its audience to “to listen, open yourself to the astral plane, to break free from social conformity, and ultimately, to become transgender” (Patel 2025).

In the Chapel, Léann Herlihy stood elevated on a metal scaffolding against the backdrop of a stunning stained-glass window, gifted in 1849, during the height of the Famine, to the Royal Hospital Kilmainham by Queen Victoria. i’d rather be a fag than be your bird (2022) was a complex work queering mis-recognition.[4] Beneath their makeshift perch, a red hand truck held a 35mm slide projector aimed at a nearby screen. On the screen, white text on a black background offered brief image descriptions. Herlihy held in their hand a remote control that advanced the slide carousel. Firstly, traversing intergenerational trauma via colonised and colonising bodies, Herlihy gave an account of the end of the tumultuous reign of British monarch King Edward II (1284-1327), who was deposed amidst rumours of homosexuality. A key part of the story was the manner in which the King had died, by apparently having molten metal poured into his anus. The artist’s voice, and the pace of their delivery, lulled the viewer into a false sense of security, while their description of Edward’s tortuous death from within, was viscerally provocative intending to leave viewers clenching their body tightly as a way of grounding the self against the imagined pain. Next, foregrounding their trans* identity, Herlihy recounted a public encounter where they were declared a “fag” and mis-gendered as a cis-gender homosexual man.  Herlihy described their internal thought process in the seconds before the accusing homophobe realised the mis-recognition and self-corrected with another derogatory and gendered utterance. Throughout the performance, the alt text image descriptions on the screen, typically used to enhance accessibility or provide a more detailed context of the image, cleverly moved beyond binary oppositions and the visual in terms of identification. Their inclusion prompted the audience to think about identification and Othering, embodiment and the limits of language.

Sam Keogh’s performance The Unicorn Surrenders to a Maiden Cartoon (2024) was inspired by the 16^th-century Flemish tapestry The Hunt of the Unicorn (c. 1495-1505), seven massive tapestries. Keogh’s work focused specifically on the section The Unicorn Surrenders to a Maiden. This was composed of three separated pieces of large butcher paper, with brightly coloured pencil and marker collaged drawings, pieced together with blue decorator tape and mounted on telescoping metal poles, and a metal ladder. Keogh’s semi-improvised text imagined the lost fragment of the tapestry where the Maiden awaits the arrival of a fabled unicorn she hopes to capture with her virginity. Keogh’s performance wove together fragments of an ekphrastic meditation on The Unicorn Surrenders to a Maiden. This was inspired by The Tapestry (1960) by Afrofuturist writer Samuel R. Delany, combined creatively with Ridley Scott’s fantasy film Legend (1985) and fused with the legend of Europa’s abduction and the origin of the design of the flag of the European Union. In Keogh’s humorous performance, the artist played the Narrator, the Maiden awaiting the Unicorn’s appearance and the swamp hag Meg Mucklebones. An unexpected intruder in the rose garden, the green-faced Meg, a character from Ridley Scott’s film (which features a quest to kill a unicorn), interrupts the established narrative. The materiality of blue decorator tape emphasised the construction and piecing together of Keogh’s compositional intertextuality. While a cartoon might ordinarily be a preparatory drawing for a fresco, an oil painting or a tapestry, in this instance, the cartoon is animated, weaving together an interplay of texts, images and performances, traversing histories, politics and temporalities. Following this segment, Daisy ushered the audience into the final performance space with an invitation to: “Let the power of unknowing wash over you into the depths of transformation”.

In the Great Hall, Bea McMahon’s Background (2025) featured the artist alongside collaborators choreographer Artémise Ploegaerts and writer Díc Walsh.[5] Background is a fragment of McMahon’s Crickets, a six-part TV series filmed at different locations in Ireland. McMahon’s work invokes an aesthetics of “cringe tragedy”, that is a sombre cringing that “feeds righteous indignation” (Smilges 2024). In this somewhat surrealist work, two performers and a narrator brought together movement, spoken word and objects. McMahon wore a black leotard with black tights with a large flesh coloured dildo stuffed down one leg, thus offering an overt demonstration of crossing the normatively policed boundaries of biological sex. Ploegaerts was dressed in leather shorts and a long sleeve shirt with bold designs that appeared like blackwork tattoos on both arms. The statuesque Walsh, with a white fur draped around his neck and a large wide-brimmed hat bearing a tangle of leafy branches on his head, visually referenced something arboreal. The performance was decidedly interspecies as performers used a variety of props that morphed into hybrid human-avian and -stingray chimeras. The sexual innuendo “choking the chicken” – an informal term used to describe male masturbation – here moved beyond heteronormative reproduction, as the unified bodies of the three performers sandwiched together in a curious position imagined a new sexual formation. At other times, bodies were folded and stuffed into red plastic bags and awkwardly dragged around, likely signifying they were merely inconvenient waste to be disposed. Throughout the performance, viewers were aware that the theatrical event and its audience was being filmed for a larger project.[6] Although this performance was more abstract than the previous two (which followed more narrative approaches), in relation to Terrapolis, it offered the opportunity to focus on what may often be dismissed as mere ancillary details, and how these can come to the fore when specifically presented for closer inspection. In this way, this performance was suggestive of Haraway’s assertion that “staying with the trouble requires making oddkin; that is, we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles”, perhaps indicating that something that makes one cringe might be worth such discomfort if it calls us to question what we often dismiss as normative (Haraway 2016: 4).

At the conclusion, Daisy, now transformed into a slithering monster, flung open the doors of the Great Hall. Crawling on the floor, her soft purple tentacles spread themselves wide as she scrambled to reach audience members, eagerly bidding her fellow “Monsters” to follow her into the next room for the drink reception. Performance events like Terrapolis are crucial for extending further engagement with the challenging ideas within the exhibition. Importantly, the dynamic interplay between theoretical and relational of such events temporarily convene communities of engaged viewers whereby worlding becomes an active mode of thought, for worlding is an “embodied and enacted progress – a way of being in the world”, enabling human and non-human to become with each other in the time and space we currently inhabit (Palmer and Hunter 2018).

Notes

[1] Staying with the Trouble https://imma.ie/whats-on/staying-with-the-trouble/

[2] It was originally commissioned by Live Works at Centrale Fies and supported by Mondriaan Fonds Project Grant.

[3] Daisy: Prophet of the Apocalypse was also exhibited in Staying with the Trouble.

[4] This work is in the Collection of the Arts Council (2022).

[5] Supported by Mondriaan Fonds, Dublin City Council, Kunstverein Aughrim and the Arts Council.

[6] Prior to commencing, audience members who did not wish to appear on camera could be seated in an area off camera.