IMMA Outdoors
IMMA Outdoors turned the Museum inside-out throughout the summer to promote the public’s use of IMMA’s 48-acre site.
The museum has doubled its People’s Pavilions from that of 2020, with a pavilion sited on both the Front Lawn and the Meadows, which hosted daily programmes of free workshops, talks and performances to a wide variety of communities. In addition to becoming a vibrant hub for the public, we were able to open the space to other organisations to support creative partnerships, facilitate collaboration and enhance community engagement. Over the course of the summer IMMA worked with Poetry Ireland, Hugh Lane Gallery, Common Ground, Fatima Groups United, Dance Ireland, asylum seekers from Mosney Direct Provision Centre via DCU, Helium Arts, Queer Culture Ireland, Fighting Words, Migrants and Ethnic-minorities for Reproductive Justice (MERJ), New Community Partnership and Broken Talkers.
To mark IMMA’s birthday year a series of artworks were commissioned for IMMA Outdoors. Forerunner, a young artist collective, produced some beautiful creative socially distanced seating and benches. These were dotted across the site and became very popular, increasing dwell time on the site. The seats were designed so that they could be constructed into a house, an artefact of the present, so in this pre-construction phase they were named Young Fossil. The formal gardens was the stage for a wonderfully colourful installation in the central fountain and dotted around the open spaces. Club Chroma: Chlorologia by Niall Sweeney was an imaginative composition that brought together the flora of the gardens with the energy and colour of nightclubs. Ping Pong Diplomacy by Mark Clare was installed on the Garden Terrace, causing families and friends to spend hours locked in competition over games of table tennis.
The Garden House at the bottom of the formal gardens was transformed by an installation, Poetry Speaks. This was a series of films integrating poetry into everyday life, presented by The Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation NYC, Poetry Ireland, and Druid. In the Courtyard Croí Glan, Integrated Dance Company, premiered their latest work In Place, and live music and DJ sets took place on Wednesday evenings.
The grass in the meadows was allowed to grow into a wildflower meadow and the gardeners cut pathways to encourage the local community to wander through. The Visitor Engagement Team delivered biodiversity and garden tours and workshops as well as art workshops, yoga classes and other activities which encouraged visitors to relax and explore this minor ecosystem in the heart of the city.
IMMA Outdoors 2021 delivered 138 events and 4 commissions throughout the summer. It brought 180,205 visitors of all ages to the site, an increase of 280% on the 2020 initiative, highlighting the public’s appetite for outdoor programming and interactive commissions. Staging such activities on the site is integral to creating a radically public space that local communities feel part of and will be continued as part of IMMA’s strategy into the future.
