My Weekend: The ideal Friday night seems like such a distant fantasy now!

Sound artist and filmmaker, Vicky Langan.
Around this time last year, I first wrote to Ainle to volunteer my administration skills for his fundraising campaign for ACLAÍ Palestine — a community gym/movement space for the residents of the overcrowded and regularly tear-gassed Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem. The following day, Ainle and I met for a coffee at Alchemy and he mentioned that they were flying out to the occupied West Bank to smuggle in the gym equipment in two weeks time. Would I come too? Fire and 3fe coursed through me on the walk home as I stared at the Dublin to Tel Aviv flight path on my phone. Less than an hour after having first met Ainle, I texted back a screenshot of my plane ticket and the words “I’m in”. A few months after we’d gotten ACLAÍ Palestine off the ground, Ainle asked if I’d come on board as the producer of his podcast. We work well together and have a real laugh in the process, too. Teamwork makes the dream work!

I’ve become increasingly conscious of the hard, unpaid graft involved when people work on projects they are passionate about. Ainle and I devote hours of invisible work to each episode and we’d love to get to the point where that effort is valued and supported somehow. Patreon has opened up that possibility, but we’re still in the ‘doing it for the pure love of it’ zone.
In terms of my own art practice, I’m working on a project relating to the Tuam writer, Joseph O’Neill, so I schedule time for that, too.
Some Saturdays I might be working at My Goodness, or I could be home, researching potential guests or working on forthcoming art/music commissions. There are no clear markers in my life to delineate ‘work’ and ‘time off’, but I try to recognise when the balance is badly off and do something to fix it.
If money was no object where would you head to on a weekend city break? And who would you bring with you?
New episodes are uploaded every second Friday.
Rebel Matters is fully supported by the listeners of the podcast through our Patreon (https://patreon.com/rebelmatters).
Ainle said: “The Rebel Matters Podcast started in 2017 as a side project to building ACLAÍ, a personal training business in Cork city.”
Rebel Matters episodes can be heard on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Play, YouTube, TuneIn, and anywhere where podcasts are usually found online.For more see https://www.patreon.com/rebelmatters and