Port to Port: meet the Cork expats celebrating Patrick's Day with a festival in their new town
While we're shivering in sympathy with the parade participants on Pana, an entirely hipper and sunnier Patrick's Day will be had by the Cork musicians travelling to Lisbon for this boutique festival.
A Cork-founded arts collective called A Garden Collective have been making a bit of a name for themselves on the Lisbon scene.
Since 2020, they have been organising the Port to Port arts festival, with an ethos of cultural exchange and showcasing alternative musicians.
A Garden Collective has four members. Cork-based Niall Hearne, Lisbon-based Eddie Ivers and Emmet Coleman, also known as Nugget, are friends since secondary school. Englishman Eden Flanagan joined once they had moved to Portugal. They were founded in Cork in 2017, when Niall moved home from Portugal and decided to organise events.
“I got onto my friends who were in college with me, and I was asking them to do something like start a collective or something, so they were on board with the art side of things”, Niall says. “At the same time I met Cara Kursh, an amazing musician who used to work in The Friary, so then we had our venue.”
His friends came up with A Garden Collective as a name, and so a group of people organically came together, including DJ duo County Vinyl, of which Emmet is a member.
That summer, The Friary went on to host most of the collective’s events, which included art exhibitions, live music, DJing and food, before Niall and Emmet joined Eddie in Lisbon in 2018.
A growing Irish community, and GAA Portugal
Irish people were few and far between when Niall and Emmet moved over. “We eventually did meet a Dublin crew,” Niall explains, “like Seán Being and a few others.”
However, since 2020, the amount of Irish people moving to Lisbon has grown. There is now a sizeable community of alternative musicians in the city who the collective collaborates with and continued the format which they saw success with back in Cork.
Before Niall and Emmet’s arrival, Eddie had worked in an Irish bar, where he met musicians and connected with the Irish community in Portugal. He says you can also see the growth in the Irish community in Lisbon through the popularity of GAA Portugal, which he helped get up and running when he moved in 2016.
“In 2017 or so, we started it up struggling to get 10-12 people for weekly training,” he says. “Last Saturday was a quieter Saturday, and we still had 21-22.”
This work within the community allowed them to work in conjunction with the embassy, who have become quite supportive of their work. “They do their céilís once a year and they have their gala dinners,” Eddie says. “And we’re covering the bases that they’re definitely not covering, in terms of a more alternative side.”
A Garden Collective see themselves as internationalist as much as Corkonian, and have collaborated with the city’s local and international population.
“We’re working within an international community with people from all over,” Eddie says. “As much as we’re proud of the roots and happy to be building the cultural bridges between the two, I don’t think it also necessarily defines what we do, that it’s an Irish collective doing this.”
This international view creates an interesting point of cultural exchange, which is clear when you look at their flagship event, Port to Port.
From one port city to another
If you have been around Cork in the past month, you may have noticed some posters for the festival around the place.
“The ethos is port to port,” Niall says. “So it’s from Cork to Lisbon basically, a transfer of art, music and culture from these two cities and these two lands, just bridging connections between them.”
An alternative St Patrick’s Festival
Taking place on the 17th and 18th of March and branding itself as an alternative St. Patrick’s Day festival, it brings together visual artists and musicians of ranging genres, half from Ireland and half from Portugal.
The line-up includes Cork-based Elaine Malone and Cara Kursh, Cork-born and Glasgow-based DJ Doubt, Cork-based DJ Nilly Noon, Limerick rappers Citrus Fresh and Hazey Haze, Cork and Lisbon-based Pôt-Pot, and visual artist Niamh McGuinness, amongst a mix of international acts.
It also includes a one-off performance piece called The Crossover, featuring an international mix of performance artists, including Strive Theatre’s Ciarán MacArtain.
The festival takes place in Arroz Estudios, a space which the collective played a large part in getting up and running. Founded by an Englishman, Arroz has an international crew of which the collective found themselves to be a part.
“We started by presenting the Garden idea to them,” Eddie says. “But then quickly we found out they needed a lot of help.” Eddie became venue manager, Emmet became bar manager, Eden did communications while Niall did food and worked behind the bar.
The collective took on a form of doing ten-hour long parties, from evening until morning, with food, spoken word performances, art exhibitions and DJs. The warehouse-style space Arroz has offers a freedom and accessibility which the collective did not have in Cork, both in terms of spaces available and nightlife restrictions.
“The venue accessibility and the culture of the place is geared towards allowing this, they have a whole system of cultural associations,” Niall explains, “so in that spectrum you can do your thing and you get your place and you become an association and promote art and culture and music.”
The collaboration with the Irish community has helped, and Port to Port is part-funded by Culture Ireland, who have special schemes for exporting Irish culture and showcasing Irish culture abroad.
This helps the collective cover the artists’ travel and accommodation expenses, general expenses, as well as a stipend for the three days. “It’s great to get the support of these entities,” Eddie says. “It’s a recognition that there is something happening here, and especially with the amount of Irish people that are moving over to Portugal, the links are constantly growing.”
Warmer climes for artists, and it’s not just the weather
Limerick-born, Cork-based singer-songwriter Elaine Malone is playing the festival following her signing with Dundalk-based label Pizza Pizza Records, best known for acts like Just Mustard and The Altered Hours.
She has travelled to Lisbon before and features on this year’s line-up both with her own band, and as a member of Pôt-Pot. The warmth and generosity of the collective is something she appreciates each time she travels over.
“They’re really open to making sure everybody is given a really good time when they’re over there,” she says, “When I was last over there, I was handed a can of Beamish on arrival and it was kind of a beautiful, thoughtful moment.”
Elaine says the collective offer Cork artists a great opportunity to showcase themselves in another country.
“My friend Niamh McGuinness is exhibiting there, and that’s fantastic, because how often do people get the opportunity to exhibit abroad?” she says. “Or say for myself, we don’t often get the opportunity to travel abroad with our music unless you have a tour behind you, so this is a really special occasion I think because there’s something really warm about it.”
This warmth, Elaine says, has a positive effect on your experience as an artist, and she knows that once in Lisbon, the collective will look after her. This can make the festival a highlight of an artist’s gig calendar.
Elaine also thinks that the festival cements Cork’s status as a cultural hub abroad. “I think it’s always had an extremely strong foothold in Ireland in general but the stuff that I see coming out of Cork now, particularly with all the younger bands, like it’s overwhelming,” she says.
“We’re totally spoiled by the calibre of art that’s coming out of Cork. I think Cork speaks for itself all the time and the idea of us having a cultural exchange with Lisbon makes perfect sense.”
How about a Port to Port for Cork?
The Cork music scene is strengthening, and the amount of the acts and new festivals happening in the city has created a buzz. Could A Garden Collective add to this and could a cultural exchange happen in the other direction?
“That would cement the ethos of the thing,” Niall says. The collective returning to their roots and putting a leg of the festival has been discussed, but not to the extent where a concrete plan is in place.
One issue with doing Port to Port in Cork is the insufficient freedom to put on their style of events, although this is set to change soon.
Although bars in Portugal close at 2am, some clubs keep going until 6am; Ireland’s licensing reform last year will bring us in line with this approach when it comes into effect.
However, Ireland’s former stricter licensing laws didn’t stop A Garden Collective in the past. “Since 2018, we did two in Cork, both of them in an undisclosed location, so a bit underground,” Niall says, “That’s going back to the difference between the two cities like: we had to do illegal things here.”
Eddie would love to return to Cork, and to do a leg of the festival here. “It would be great to do,” he says. “I suppose the one possible thing that we’d really have to look into is just the kind of type of party and scale of party. What we do here has a lot less restrictions on it than it does in Ireland, unfortunately. Even if those restrictions are being addressed right now, which is great.”
However, the collective are constantly bringing it up amongst themselves, and while nothing is set in stone, we may see Port to Port on our shores at some point in the future.
Port to Port takes place on Friday 17th and Saturday 18th of March in Arroz Estudios, in Beato, Lisbon. Tickets and more info here.
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