Online
See Through Café presents
‘Why The Moon Travels’
PREMIERE 21st November 2020, 3 pm
WHERE online on the Mother Tongues Festival YouTube channel, link below
Curators of See Through Café Francesca La Morgia and Evgeny Shtorn meet online with the writer Oein DeBhairduin and artist Leanne McDonagh to discuss their new book ‘Why The Moon Travels’, edited recently by Skein Press.
Why the moon travels is a haunting collection of twenty tales rooted in the oral tradition of the Irish Traveller community. Brave vixens, prophetic owls and stalwart horses live alongside the human characters as guides, protectors, friends and foes while spirits, giants and fairies blur the lines between this world and the otherworld.
This event is taking place as part of South Dublin County Council’s Social Inclusion Festival.
Join this live See Through Café via YouTube.
Meet the guests
Oein DeBhairduin
Oein DeBhairduin is a creative soul with a passion for poetry, folk herbalism and preserving the beauty of Traveller tales, sayings, retellings and historic exchanges. He is the manager of an education centre and a long-time board member of several Mincéirí community groups, including having had the honour of being vice-chair of the Irish Traveller Movement and a council member of Mincéir Whidden. He seeks to pair community activism with cultural celebration, recalling old tales with fresh modern connections and, most of all, he wishes to rekindle the hearth fires of a shared kinship.
Leanne McDonagh
Leanne McDonagh is an artist and an educator, she is also a Traveller woman who grew up on a halting site, with first-hand experience of the prejudices and misconceptions that society has about Travellers. As an artist she feels she has a unique opportunity to represent and record her community from within and as an educator she aims to use her experiences both positive and negative for the benefit of present and prospective students from the Travelling community. She is employed by Cork Institute of Technology as the Traveller Education Coordinator, while she also develops her practice as an artist. She is currently working on a public sculpture funded by the % for Art scheme and has recently illustrated a short story book, titled, “Why The Moon Travels” written by a fellow Traveller, Oein De Bhairduin which is the first of its kind in Ireland. Presently she is exhibiting as part of RTE’s Art & Culture Illuminations exhibition, which launched virtually in October and continues for the foreseeable future.
