Freedom Wall Paste-Up Events  >>>

Come along and help us stick things to walls!

1.00pm, Sunday 5th October: Freedom Wall, Lower Merchants Road

3.30pm, Wednesday 8th October: Children’s Freedom Wall, Eyre Square Centre

7-8.30pm,Friday 19th September, Children's Cartoon Workshop in Charlie Byrnes Bookshop.

Building A Wall To Break Down Barriers

It began as the shared dream of some NGOs – Europeans Without Borders, Cartooning for Peace, Reporters Without Borders – but soon found the hearts of young volunteers, many from underprivileged neighbourhoods outside Paris. They were inspired to create a wall of cartoons celebrating the vital role of a free press.

Following their example, we will cover walls in cartoons to raise awareness of this important freedom. Contributors draw on paper or send us images, we print these enlarged and paste them up on two walls – one for professional cartoonists from many countries, the other for local and visiting children.

This event is part of the Galway Cartoon Festival programme. Beginning on Culture Night, it will continue throughout AATE Festival 2025 and the Baboró International Arts Festival for Children.

Photography and the Built Environment 
with Mark Shiel and Alice Clancy 

Tickets: €25 - prebook via Eventbrite

A one-day workshop, guided by two conveners, in which participants make, reflect on, and discuss architectural photographs of selected buildings in Galway city centre.

Architectural photography is a key medium in disseminating knowledge and ideas about our built environment. Focusing attention on selected still images of buildings in place and time, it heightens our understanding of their visible aspects while bringing invisible details and processes to light, making the unseen seen. Architectural photography is also a professional and commercial technique used to visualise buildings according to a brief for a client (architect, developer, or property owner). Bearing in mind this tension between art and function, this workshop provides specialists and non-specialists alike an opportunity to explore and reflect on architectural photography, using Galway city centre as a studio. Guided by the conveners and working in small groups, participants will take photographs of selected buildings and locations that they will then edit, present, and discuss, expanding their technical ability and their understanding of the principals involved.

Co-conveners

 Alice Clancy is engaged in a multi-disciplinary practice involving architectural education, curation and photography. Her work, often collaborative, explores how the built environment shapes and is shaped by social and environmental contexts. She has held notable curatorial roles at La Biennale Architettura in Venice, her photography has been widely published, and she has provided academic leadership at UCD Architecture with a focus on climate literate, inclusive pedagogy.

Mark Shiel is Professor of Film, Media, and Urban Studies at King’s College London, where he teaches filmmaking and photography of the built environment. His most recent film is the 30-minute documentary Madingley (2024), about the architecture of war memorials. He has also published five books and numerous essays, most recently “Ed Ruscha’s Street Photos and the Cinematic Sequence Shot”, in Ed Ruscha’s Streets of LA (Getty Research Institute, 2025).