settle by TRESTLE

Festival Printworks Gallery, Market St.
Exhibition open from Thursday 17 – Sunday 27, September
Tuesday - Saturday 11am - 6pm, Sunday - Monday 12 noon - 5pm
FREE entry - All are welcome, no booking required 

settle is a temporary architectural installation designed and curated by TRESTLE

settle proposes a new public interior for gathering and collective experience in the contemporary city. Inspired by the functionalism and adaptability of Irish vernacular furniture, the installation explores how an infrastructure of considered objects can formulate a new, albeit temporary, public interior. The installation can be recast and reformatted to host a variety of events and gatherings – in this way it acts as an extended invitation to the city.

Supported by: 
Arts Council of Ireland (Project Award) 

Fire Structures - Ambacht studio

Exhibition/Workshop

Festival Printworks Gallery, Market St.


Exhibition open from Thursday 17 – Sunday 27, September 


Tuesday - Saturday 11am - 6pm, Sunday - Monday 12 noon - 5pm 

FREE entry - All are welcome, no booking required 

Walking Tour led by Róisín Mc Loughlin

“Níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán Féin:
Hearth to Hearth through Galway City” 

12:00 - 13:00, Sunday 27th September

Meeting point: Tigh Neachtains

Artist Talk / Workshop with Ambacht studio : 

13:00 - 15:00, Sunday 27th September

Ancient gathering around the hearth is explored through an installation of pre-modern structures in the form of cyanotype prints and a cyanotype print workshop.

Acknowledging fire’s role in human gathering and pre-modern architecture, this exhibition explores Irish settlement structures from the Grooved Ware period (3000-2400BC), a culture believed to be particularly centred around fire. The installation spatially interprets a typical circular enclosure featuring four internal posts and a central hearth.

The central hearth is represented by a rectangular podium where visitors can handle study prints. Beneath these, an undeveloped cyanotype print is affected by the changing light and visitor movement, serving as a "living" symbolic fire. Surrounding this are interconnecting stools (by Nocht Studio), creating a gathering space. Large-scale cyanotype prints—toned in ash and wheat grass—form a concentric semi-enclosure, interpreting the site plan, individual buildings, and art of the period. The exhibition culminates in a workshop led by Adela Gomez, where participants will create their own cyanotype prints and develop the print exposed under the hearth, actively engaging with the themes of architectural memory and communal creation.

Project credits Kinstools by Nocht Studio, and courtesy the KinShip project.

Gather At The Wall 

A Bayanihan Project led by Brian Ó Curnáin & Eduard Valenzuela

Festival Printworks Gallery, Market St.

Exhibition: 

Thursday 17th September - Sunday 27th September 

Round Table / Talk at the Table : 

18:00:00 - 20:00hr, Saturday 19th September

FREE entry - All are welcome, no booking required

This event will be hosted around the remnants of a rammed earth wall built in Waterford as part of the European Architecture Students Assembly (EASA) in July 2026. Over two weeks, twenty participants came together to learn and test contemporary ways of making, while sharing stories and experiences with one another. The wall became more than a structure; it became a place to gather. It was activated through a series of events, from a communal meal and film screening to storytelling, before finally becoming a place to rest beneath the stars.2

The work of those two weeks will now be brought to Printworks Gallery through the original formwork and supporting structures. Here, the wall will be given a new life once again - becoming a place for conversation and exchange. The exhibition will host talks and a discussion on the spatial role of walls today. From the Irish field boundary to contested borders, and from shared civic infrastructure to architectures of exclusion. This conversation will be led by young voices from across the built environment. 

Project credits:
Aine Dunne, Davidhenry Oghenetejiri Uyovbisere and Daniel Fehily.

Supported by:  
Grafton Architects
Tec7
EASA Seanchaí

EASA Seanchaí

Exhibition

Festival Printworks Gallery, Market St.


Exhibition open from Thursday 17 – Sunday 27, September 


Tuesday - Saturday 11am - 6pm, Sunday - Monday 12 noon - 5pm 


FREE entry - All are welcome, no booking required 

What happens when people meet, make, exchange and imagine together?

The 46th European Architecture Students Assembly, EASA Seanchaí, brought 600 architecture students from across Europe to Waterford for two weeks of collective practice and gathering. Across 41 workshops, participants worked through drawing, making, performance, publishing, spatial experimentation and documentation, producing a diverse body of work and experience.

What remains from such an intense and temporary gathering? Stories, ideas and fragments left in its wake now resurface in Galway, drawn from the many forms of making and exchange that shaped the assembly. Rather than reconstructing EASA as a single story, the exhibition brings together fragments that are partial, overlapping and unfinished, allowing different connections and readings to emerge.

What was made, shared and remembered at the assembly becomes something to encounter again, differently. Taking its theme from the tradition of the Seanchaí, the exhibition considers how stories, ideas and experiences shift as they are carried from one moment to another.

The Chloran Síle Flag 

by Miriam de Búrca and Áine Phillips

Exhibition  >>>

Festival Printworks Gallery, Market St.
Exhibition open from Thursday 17 – Sunday 27, September
Tuesday - Saturday 11am - 6pm, Sunday - Monday 12 noon - 5pm 

Talk  >>>

The Mick Lally Theatre, Druid Ln, (off Quay Street)
14:00-15:00 hr, Sunday 20th , September 2026
FREE entry - All are welcome, no booking required

The Chloran Síle Flag represents a Sheela-na-gig that has been held in the collection of the British Museum since the late 1800s, having been taken from a site in West Meath during British occupation. 

Sheela na gigs are medieval stone carvings of female figures displaying their genitalia with exaggerated grotesque and humorous facial expressions. They are found predominantly in Ireland. Experts believe they were protective talismans connected to ancient folk ideas of birth, death and life giving power. Sheela na gigs are viewed by modern feminists as symbols of female empowerment, body autonomy, and resistance against patriarchal oppression. 

The Chloran Sile Flag also confronts colonial legacies, her display highlights the expropriation of objects and treasures from Ireland that are still held in British institutions. This flag, as a symbol of identity, authority and solidarity to communicate shared values, proposes the restitution and repatriation of this ancient carving, echoing the artistic call to be found on the reverse of the flag: Síle come home.

Mayo Atlas - Aidan Conway

Mayo Atlas

Aidan Conway  /  B.Arch Tech M.Arch MRIAI

Festival Printworks Gallery, Market St.
Exhibition open from Thursday 17 – Sunday 27, September
Tuesday - Saturday 11am - 6pm, Sunday - Monday 12 noon - 5pm

FREE entry - All are welcome, no booking required 

The Mayo Atlas is a research project by Aidan Conway, exploring the built environment and landscapes of County Mayo.

Detailed 3D models from photogrammetric* and LiDAR* scans form the point of entry for each site. Dense surveys that reveal individual threads of enquiry varying from ecology, local history, geology, archaeology, construction, material, form and adaption. 

This exhibition includes 11 such sites, each forming a short story within a shared context. 

It includes collaborations with Aisling McCoy, Peter Molloy, Lottie Mac and Claire Kinsella. Conversations conducted across sites of varying scale and detail.

The objective of this ongoing research is to embed oneself in a context through the study of specific moments that, at times, may offer universal insights

Supported by: The Arts Council 

Your Seat at the Table 

Directed and produced by Michelle Delea

Festival Printworks Gallery, Market street.
FREE entry - All are welcome, no booking required 

Exhibition: 

Thursday 17th September - Sunday 27th September 

Workshop: 

12:00 - 14:00, Saturday 19th September

Artist Talk: 

14:00 - 15:00, Sunday 27th September

Your Seat at the Table is a creative, participatory workshop and interactive exhibition. Architectural representations often fail to capture the messiness of everyday experiences in our homes and the impacts that buildings have on our lives. 

Your Seat at the Table aims to collectively share our everyday experiences of inhabiting our homes and neighbourhoods.  

Your story could be about barriers to having a safe or secure home, or about things that you hold dear and long to hold onto. We will make visible the conditions that we need to turn a house into a comfortable and safe home. 

We recognise that people communicate, learn and share experiences in diverse ways. You are invited to join us - to sit around the table and tell your story in a way that feels right for you. Use your voice, your hands, your ears, your heart. 

Workshop materials and tools will be provided. 

Supported by * 

Your Seat at the Table is part of a wider research project funded by Research Ireland, in conjunction with TU Dublin (academic partner) and the RIAI (enterprise partner).

Project credits

Co-designed by Ailbhe Cunningham, Ample Space & Leo Keller, funkelgrund with support from Kevin Donovan & Paddy Dolan, TUDublin. 

Film + Architecture Workshop

Workshop, Exhibition, Film screenings

18th September – 24th September

10:00 – 18:00hr 

Based at The Mick Lally Theatre, Druid Lane

For AATE 2026, Le Chéile – The Architectures of Belonging invites us to reconsider architecture not as the production of isolated objects, but as the cultivation of relationships. This film workshop calls for an understanding of the built environment as a shared ecology, where humans, non-humans, infrastructures, landscapes, memories, and everyday practices continuously shape one another.

Workshop led by Sabrina Morreale, Lemonot Studio and Søren Nørkjær Bang, Architecture Forum (CAFx) with Thomas Kerr Bell. 

Guest tutors;
Dr Torange Khonsari 
Alessandro Pasero 
Docar Films - Jasper Meurer 

Films will premiere on Thursday 24th September at 17:00hr in the Festival Printworks Gallery, Q&A + Drinks.

Supported by: Screen Ireland, Skills Development Funding Scheme 

Part of the LINA Architecture Programme 

Blanka Major + Hinterland

Pálás an Phobail - tasting a sense of place

Festival Printworks Gallery, Market St, (Next to the Portershed a dó.)
19:00-23:00 hr, Friday 18 September, 2026
FREE entry – but prebooking is essential, no registration no entry.

AATE are working in collaboration with Blanka Major and Hinterland with the aim to connect food, people and place.

Architecture at the Edge is partnership with Hinterland will create a series of spaces of encounter for Culture Night, - curated by Blanka Major - connecting an outdoor installation on Druid Lane, a happening at the Mick Lally Theatre, and a culinary exploration at the Festival Printworks Gallery through the shared theme of belonging.

At its heart is an edible installation that takes the form of a Pálás an Phobail—a People’s palace—where the everyday rituals of gathering, eating, listening, and exchanging ideas unfold through food, sound, and conversation. Guests move through a sequence of spaces shaped by stories and sensory encounters, each revealing a different relationship between food, landscape and memory—inviting them to taste a sense of place. From a canopy of flags stretching across the street and a performative public interior, to solitary moments and shared tables, the evening explores how places—and people—come to belong through the encounters they foster, the stories they carry, and the memories they create.

The evening includes inputs by:

Professor Anna Davies, Geography, Trinity College Dublin & 

Michael Higgins, Political Liaison & Systems Change Lead, Bohemians Co-operatives.

Blanka Major / Curators Talk >>>

The Mick Lally Theatre, Druid ln, Galway.

17:00 – 19:30 h, Sunday 20 September 

Tickets: Free but prebooking is advised via Eventbrite

‘Pálás an Phobail - tasting a sense of place’, is part of the Culture Night Late programme, funded by the Arts Council and the Department of Culture, Communications and Sport under the Night-Time Economy programme with support from Galway City Council Arts Office.

For more details on Culture Night Late in Galway City, you can check out the @thisisgalway or @Archattheedge Instagram pages.

BIOS

Blanka Major is a Zurich-based architect with Hungarian roots whose work spans architecture, food, research, teaching, writing, and curation. She explores how everyday infrastructures shape collective life, using cooking as a spatial and social practice. She is part of ZAS*, a LINA Spotlight Fellow 2025, and was nominated for the Swiss Art Award in Architecture (2026).

The Hinterland Team are a west of Ireland based initiative dedicated to community-rooted research, creativity, and action that nourishes just, inclusive and sustainable food futures. Together with Blanka will we curate an event which responds to the intersecting challenges of climate, agriculture, access, and belonging by cultivating holistic, place-based models of change.

Architecture at the Edge in CAFx, Copenhagen

Exhibition, Discussion & Film Screenings

4th November – until the end of December.

Monday-Thursday 10:00 - 16:00 and Friday 10:00-15:30. 

Location CAFx - Copenhagen Architecture Forum,
Halmtorvet 27,1700 København V

Architecture at the Edge (IRL) in collaboration with Copenhagen Architecture Forum (CAFx) presents the work of three outstanding Irish architecture practices, the 2026 RIBA Royal Gold Medallist, Níall McLaughlin Architects, Cotter & Naessens Architects and Clancy Moore Architects. 

The exhibition will be accompanied by the Danish premiere of recently commissioned films by each practice as well as a discussion with the architects at the CAFx primary exhibition and event space in Copenhagen.

We are delighted to be able to showcase this work as part of Cultúr 2026: Sharing Ireland’s Culture, the culture programme for Ireland’s Presidency of the Council of the European Union 2026.

Supported by: Culture Ireland