2023 Curatorial Callout: City Limitless

We’re imagining a map. Fine print on a well-worn page – Dublin now and Dublin then – and in our palm, a pencil. There’s a future to be drawn. There’s a festival to be made.

Sketch with us. Trace the city’s layers. Energy pings through finely drawn lines, ravenous, and ready to be released. Scrawl collectivism, joy, care, beauty. Be expansive in your approach. This map has space for everyone, there is enough land and sky to share. 

Let’s reroute the river, queer the monuments and rewire the power sources. This is Dublin Fringe Festival we’re talking about: don’t stay within the lines. Use every crayon in the box. Draw playgrounds in the place of office-blocks, scribble laughs along electricity cables, mark chaos between the cobblestones and ink mischief across the grid. Together we’ll redraw the city as we want it.  

Maps make sense of where we are now, and show us where we could go next. Artists, you are the key. To the map, to the city, to the possible. Chart the topography of your craft. Lace your dreams around the lines of latitude. Allow hope to sink in. All the art you have yet to make. All the dormant ideas yet to erupt, transforming the landscape, making it new. 

Drop a pin. Situate yourself in time and place. Your body is your first landscape. Inhabit it. Sound travels - let your ideas echo. Whisper poems through the airwaves, pulse beats into old walls, hammer your feet on the streets until they know the rhythm of us. Seed bomb the concrete with colour. Fill glass and steel spaces with living, breathing art.

Find potency in vacancy - it creates space to experiment. The worlds you create to share shed new light, upturn tradition and remind us to laugh at notions of permanence. Your art poses questions, pokes fun, unsettles, sends tired systems tumbling like Jenga. Towers turned back to blocks. Blocks that could build new things. 

This is an all-island call to action for disrupters, visionaries and messers to show your boldest ideas to intrepid audiences. We count on your guts, graft and glitter. Gather a crowd and invite them to see differently. Cast a spell of stillness with unexpected beauty in a familiar place. Unfurl new potential through a performance beyond words. Capture the anticipation of late night lights through wet bus windows. Provide the certainty of found families tethered across a dance floor.

Before you know it, you’re running lines in the bike lane, cracking the redraft on the red line, practicing muted choreography while waiting for the 46A. Eureka moments hummed into voice notes, epiphanies that turn your walk home into a run. The shared momentum all adds up and when you look around, the city is as you drew it for a brilliant moment in time. 

This September, let’s render the city limitless. 

                -   Ruth McGowan, Artistic Director & CEO and
                     Bee Sparks, Artistic Projects Manager