Tuiscint na Talún

What is Tuiscint na Talún?

Tuiscint na Talún means ‘wisdom of the land’; referring to the wisdom the land itself possesses. Tuiscint na Talún is an education project that is focused on exploring ways of de-linking from colonial modernity in Ireland and re-connecting to indigenous ancestral lifeways that were attuned to the land. It encompasses a number of creative approaches and outlets that jointly seek to cultivate and explore different ways of re-connecting with the land and our ancestors through ancient sacred places in Ireland. We strongly believe that the knowledges that need to be (re)created for futures without colonialism and the colonial way of being need to be (re)generated in community, and not by any one individual or project. To this end, Tuiscint na Talún endeavours to support the learning journeys of anyone seeking to engage in this kind of work.

Tuiscint na Talún’s work comes at a critical juncture for our species as we face the growing material realities of our own extinction driven by the unsustainability of our sociopolitical present. Climate breakdown and the global pandemic of COVID-19 have made the deep instability of modern life ever more apparent, with both of these processes being by-products of how global colonial culture conceptualises and interacts with nature. Conversely, as our ancestors’ lifeways were inherently more ‘sustainable’ than ours, establishing a reconnective relationship between who they were and who we are may serve us well as a creative process for re-establishing the community that once existed between people and the living world. This is not to seek a return to the past, but to build from ancient wisdoms in order to shape a society based on values that fundamentally respect and love the Earth and all of the more-than-human worlds around us. Thus our interest and mission is to explore what and how we can learn from the land itself as a wise and ancient being that our ancestors were intimately attuned to, and that has lived through many cataclysms before. What can it teach us in this time of transition, and how can our ‘indigenous’ ancestral lifeways illuminate paths to deeper corporeal understandings of the universe than what we currently live in our society that is so removed from the Earth?

Acknowledging Indigenous teachers

The approaches taken by Tuiscint na Talún owe to Indigenous peoples around the planet who, through academic research, activism, art, and cultural work, have articulated the imperative for decolonising our minds and re-centring indigenous values and cultural practices wherever we are, no matter how deeply buried they may be from our lived realities. This is our attempt at re-membering, re-centring and living those values and practices.

Offerings, focus and projects

Current

The offering running at current is the seminar on ‘a decolonial approach to Ireland’s ancient culture and landscapes’. This is a broad introduction to the work and approaches taken by Tuiscint na Talún. Dates for this online seminar can be found on the Calendar page of the website.

We are also focused on nurturing a community and following online, given the circumstances of COVID-19. There is a Facebook group that is free to join for anyone interested in or doing work around decolonising, the land, spirituality, ancestral knowledges and wisdoms, folklore etc in Ireland. People outside of Ireland are also very much welcome – we’d love to hear from you and your experiences too.

Tuiscint na Talún is undertaking a project to create audio field recordings from places of ecological and cultural significance on the island of Ireland. We often don’t account for the impact of noise pollution that is nearly all-encompassing around the planet. In Ireland particularly it is difficult to find anywhere that is not impacted by the sounds of modern society. This project is an effort to draw attention to this, but to also create opportunities for people to connect with specific places through sound when they cannot necessarily get to the place themselves. The library of these sounds will be made available to all as creative commons. We have set up a Patreon for the purpose of funding the costs involved in running this project.

In the works

a multi-session course on the land relating to creating decolonial ways of being with land and rejuvenating ancient wisdoms

an online multi-session group workshop centred around creating healing avenues for the multiple forms of grief that we all inhabit at this historical juncture: grief from the destruction of land, from the loss of cultural meaning, from the loss of community, from climate change, etc.

You can subscribe for updates on all future events and offerings on our website: https://www.talun.ie