Solace: New community culture festival to light up Cork this December 

THE past few years of creativity and culture in Cork have happened against a fairly turbulent background, to say the least: a post-pandemic period where the ongoing venue crisis in the city has intensified; the further fragmentation of people’s habits and attention spans, especially where points of online discovery and word-of-mouth are concerned; and the knock-on effects on artists and facilitators of cost-of-living, housing and healthcare crises.

Simply put, it’s perhaps taken a tad longer than we all thought for a cultural scene to come together coherently after the dust settled on the past few years, and after a couple of double-bookings around a city that’s still finding its groove in terms of event attendance, one young film curator took it upon himself to get organising. 

The result? Solace, a new programme of events happening this month at venues around the city, put on by new and emerging facilitators, to make good on the city’s potential amid winter’s relative quiet.

“I started Out of Frame last year, which is a monthly film talk, upstairs in the Roundy,” says Solace co-founder Ben Rupprecht. “We invite three filmmakers every session, give them some space to showcase their work, and then have a chat about how they got into film, etc. The entire idea behind that was to build a bit more of a network and community in the film scene.

“Through that, we did the Prisma Queer Film Festival last August, which we’re hoping to bring back next year as well, maybe extend it a bit. I’m also part of the committee of the People’s Picture House, which is the monthly short film screening at the Pavilion. That’s kind of where the idea for me started. My main idea was to start a WhatsApp group together between all our different initiatives, because we had so many events that were clashing.”

Solace member Em Egan Reeve can speak to Rupprecht’s motivation and enthusiasm. “I’m the founder of an open-mic... poetry, music, everything, collaborative event called Litreacha, and my co-host, Louis Egan McCutcheon, was asked if we would like to do a collaboration, just with Out of Frame, on a one to one basis. Then when we met a week after that, Ben had this plan for a bigger, collaborative effort with the people who were running these independent, creative initiatives in Cork. We were one of the first groups to say that we would love to be involved.”

Through mutual connections with others of a like mind, and a wider circle of common artistic cause to be drawn from, Rupprecht was able to assemble a wide and eclectic range of co-conspirators from across different artistic disciplines and media. And though an initial idea was to trial a programme of events that would be mutually promoted and involve community outreach, the foundations are already in place for cross-collaboration on a more permanent basis.

“I got in touch with [queer open-mic night] Litreacha, Cork Zine Fest and a few others, [to gauge] interest to start a few more collaborations. I quite liked the idea of starting to, like, collaborate more, build more of a network between us, come to support one another, and the idea to kind of introduce that was Solace.

“Run a small festival, putting all the events that we have, and would have run anyway, together under one roof. The idea with Solace now in December is to launch the entire new community — there’s more initiatives involved that are not able to put something together for December, but that’s a start.”

On the topic of starts, Solace member Nicole deLarge got her start in the past few years as part of indie gig promotions house Fuzzy Pockets, alongside veteran DIY head Andy Wilson and others, as well as with Rupprecht on Out of Frame, working on design, as well as some band management and such on her own steam. Solace, however, provides her the opportunity to make a new beginning of her own, under the working name of Lighter, seeking to establish and build local-scale gigs and live-event platforms, as well as working collectively with other members of the group, as evidenced by a debut gig at the Kino, followed by a co-promotion that centres the work of The Kabin crew in a Sunday show.

“I think it’s a great opportunity for Lighter to start, because I’ve been involved in a lot of these little organisations, like Out of Frame, mainly. I feel the artistic community here is so big, and has so much potential. People always complain that around December, there’s nothing going on in town, and it’s cold and no one wants to go outside, and we were just like, okay, let’s just get everyone together and do something.

“It was just very friendly and communal, starting this all together, and I think we’re all in the same boat of like, ‘yeah, everyone is cool, everyone is at home, it’s before Christmas. No one wants to do anything, just work and boring life, so why not come up with something that can warm us up a bit?”

The programme takes in everything from live music, cinema screenings and open-mic nights, to crafting, collage, and explorations of Cork’s urban nature and folklore amid the creep of winter — the latter of which will be hosted by Cork Queer Nature Collective, as they set about establishing an increasingly important balance of artistic practice and environmental awareness among regular event attendees and online followers.

“We’re going to be exploring the Irish calendar, looking specifically at solstices and equinoxes, the nature-centred traditions we had around it, specifically looking at it through more of a queer lens, I suppose,” says Florence Humphrys, of Cork Queer Nature Collective.

“Em got in contact with me, they thought that our events would be a nice tie-in to the Solace initiative, because a lot of them are poetry events or music events, but having something queer and inclusive and community-driven that was more focused on getting people engaging with the nature and ecosystems around them is another kind of creative expression.

“I think it just made sense for us to be included in that. We’re still open to more initiatives joining in on Solace, but the group that we have currently is a nice mix of very different fields.

As that transition from a once-off event to a potential generational banner under which so many artists and facilitators can cross-pollinate and further create new things, the vision of what Solace can be — as well as the city that hosts it — is coming together, gradually, but surely, and with purpose.

“One of the reasons why I think so many initiatives came up over the last year is that there was still a bit of a void after covid and a lot of other things that have happened,” Rupprecht says.

“There are more people, and especially younger people as well, that started to fill that void, because there was less going on, which I think is why there’s such an energy at the moment, and more motivation, and which is, I guess, was feeding into the motivation to collaborate and to communicate more.

“For me, personally, I’ve always experienced the Cork art scene as really diverse and inclusive, which is one of the main focuses behind Solace now. It’s not a coincidence that there’s, like, a really strong queer representation in it and presentation in the members as well. So that was one of the main points that came up in all our discussions as well, and like, one of the main focuses. We’re generally open to really every art form and every kind of culture initiative, it just really has to fit into that kind of value system.”

“I think the main thing that I’ve taken away from our meetings with the other initiatives that are part of Solace, is that we really just want to have each other’s backs, as nonprofit initiatives,” says Humphrys. “We’re just people who are, for the most part, doing this unfunded, or applying to the Arts Council and other sources of funding. But it’s very much people doing this on their own backs. I guess we wanted to take an approach of making events as accessible to people as possible.”

“We are all very similarly minded,” adds Egan Reeve. “We are just a bunch of really, easy-going people, but we all have the same work ethic in terms of making these things ourselves, running them for little to no profit, all trying to just improve our community, above all else, and give people spaces where they can investigate and explore areas of themselves that they might not have done before.

“It’s going to be such an ambitious thing, but I think it’s going to go fantastically, and it’s going to give me a great excuse to go to all of these events. I haven’t been to a few of these events, and that’s the case for a good few people, not having made it to all of the events.

“And y’know what? All these people are my friends, so I can’t wait to see what they come up with, and who comes to all of these. We’re getting a lot more reach than we would on our own. Hopefully we can gather together an even bigger community, and be able to share what we are passionate about.”

Solace Festival runs from Tuesday, December 10, to Sunday, December 22, in venues around Cork city. For more see Solace on Instagram: instagram.com/solacecork/