Our FIFTH annual Open Day returned on 20 June 2026!
Open Day 2026
On Saturday 20 June we opened our doors to the public for Project’s fifth annual Open Day, a day jam-packed full of free performances, workshops, talks, tours, music, dancing, food and more. It’s a chance for artists and audience members alike to experience Project like never before in as relaxed a setting as possible. Our open-door policy meant that anybody was welcome to wander through our spaces, chat with our artists, and hopefully engage with different art forms that they wouldn’t have been exposed to before.
A huge thank you to Shelley Gibson and Vanessa O’Connell for ISL provision throughout the day, and thank you to our artists and audiences for attending our Open Day this year. Whether it was your first time or your 100th time, we can’t wait for your next visit!
Photography credit – Pati Guimarães and Vinicius Pescador.
Food and Catering
Indigo & Cloth
Indigo & Cloth served up their summer favourite, a Cold Brew Cream Top, throughout the morning. Founder Andy Collins then joined our Artistic Director Sophie Motley for a chat about our 15 year long relationship, and the importance of sharing a moment with artists over good coffee.
Food Baby
Food Baby provided the grub at lunchtime, serving up some of Nigeria’s most loved flavours and street food favourites.
Music & Dance
Woman in STEM
Woman in STEM provided the tunes in our Upper Foyer throughout the day with some nu-disco, electronica, tech house, Khia Assylum Pop and plenty of cheeky soundcloud pop edits.
Sarah-Jane O’Regan – ISL Disco
Sarah-Jane O’Regan lead us through an interactive performance to experience music like never before through Irish Sign Language and visual storytelling. As a performance interpreter and presenter passionate about experiencing music through multi-sensory approaches and ISL, her ISL Disco brought songs to life visually, allowing our Open Day audience, regardless of hearing levels, to see the words, feel the emotions, and experience music in a different way.
Performances & Workshops
Fearghal Curtis – Podcast Recording
Fearghal set up at our Open Day with his podcast desk and mic to chat to people about their work, their creative process, their relationship to the arts, and more! Anybody and everybody was welcome to sit down and chat, and all recordings have been combined together into one recording and kept for archival purposes.
Alessandra Azeviche – Dance Workshop
Alessandra Azeviche invited participants of any dance experience to reconnect body and spirit through ancestral wisdom and the vibrant rhythms of Afro-Brazilian culture.
We FORAGE For…
We FORAGE for… Is an arts collective who explore the multiplicity of ways in which we can engage with the natural world. Every creative action begins with a foraging session. At our Open Day founders Ailbhe & Emma invited visitors to create a petal mandala made from foraged foliage, encouraging them to take a moment for themselves.
Tierra Porter – Gather & Sing Workshop
Led by Tierra Porter, Gather & Sing blended classical vocal training and gospel-rooted musicality with techniques from children’s theatre to make play, creativity, and communal music making accessible to adults of all experience levels.
Sementes do Cerrado
Sementes do Cerrado brought the rhythms with the Samba de Roda, a vibrant expression of music, dance, and poetry. Emerging in the seventeenth century in the Recôncavo region of Bahia, the performances carried the rhythms, movements, and knowledge of ancestral memory.
Black Tones
Black Tones presented a number of performers from their community, from spoken word to live music, recreating the essence of their open-mic nights.
D’Girlos Theatre
D’Girlos Theatre presented a condensed performance of their award-winning play That’s Sooo Povo.
Ciarán O’Keefe / Smilin’ Kanker
Smilin’ Kanker had multiple pop-up performances throughout the day, singing a cycle of love songs to his spectators. From our Balcony to our Gallery, Smilin’ Kanker was there to entertain!
Louis Haugh
Louis Haugh set up shop in our Balcony for the day with his Gay Lemonade Stand. Throughout the day visitors were invited up for refreshment, alongside drop-in mini Queer ecology workshops to explore, learn, and engage with.
Tours
Eating the Sun Gallery Tours
Alongside Marysia Więckiewicz, Curator of Visual Arts at Project, our Curatorial Intern Pola Folwarczny facilitated guided tours – both in English and Polish – of Eating the Sun, the first ever exhibition of Liliana Zeic’s work in Ireland. Eating the Sun ran in our Gallery from 1 May – 18 July 2026.
Building Tour
Our House Manager Han Tiernan led a tour of the entire building, including back-stage access and a peek into our non-public spaces.
Games
NeuroGamers Ireland
NeuroGamers were back by popular demand with even more boards. Taking over our Upper Foyer for the day they invited visitors to learn a new game and connect with fellow gamers.
Installations
Tobi Bello
As the first installation in our brand new Percolator space, Tobi Bello presented The Queer Archive, a community-led digital and print archive created with participants from Out South Central, an LGBTQI+ group at Fatima Groups United Family Resource Centre.. Developed through a series of gatherings and conversations, the archive brings together photography, audio, video, personal reflections, and archival materials that celebrate the stories, experiences, and memories of the community.
Film Screenings
As part of our Open Day there were multiple film screenings free to view throughout the day in the Cube.
Film Screenings
Jessie Thompson – The Floor Is Yours
Teen girls from across North Dublin unite through dance, connection and creativity in a powerful short documentary celebrating community, empowerment and the future of women in movement.
The film was created with filmmaker Luca Truffarelli, students from Stanhope Street Secondary School and dance schools in NEIC and surrounding areas as part of Jessie’s Dance Artist in Residence Award 2025/26.
Jessie Thompson is a Dublin-based dance artist, choreographer, performer, and curator whose work bridges hip-hop and contemporary dance across theatre, film, live music, and non-traditional performance spaces. Her practice explores rhythm, physicality, collective energy, and collaboration through multidisciplinary performance and community engagement.
Louise Bruton – Let Go
When ex-best friends Orla and Meghan run into each other as adults, revisiting their past reminds us that while being disabled is hard, being a teenage girl is harder.
Louise Bruton is an arts journalist, writer, DJ and disability rights activist. Let Go is her directing debut, a story inspired by her love of pop culture and her experience of being a disabled teenager. She made her theatre debut in 2017’s Dublin Fringe Festival with a sold-out run of Why Won’t You Have Sex With Me? She is currently working on a non-fiction book with support from the Arts Council.
I Belong – Fatoumata Gandega
Laliya navigates her cultural identity and belonging, reconciling Somali heritage with suburban life in Ireland while facing isolation and misunderstanding.
Fatoumata Gandega is a writer, filmmaker, curator, and artist based in Dublin. Her practice addresses identity, displacement, and belonging themes, centering voices from diasporic, Muslim, and Black communities. She employs a collaborative and participatory approach with groups to co-create work that reflects their authentic experiences. Inspired by interdisciplinary approaches, Gandega integrates visual arts, film, cultural archives, and oral histories to challenge dominant narratives and reimagine the possibilities of representation. Her approach is rooted in storytelling, using narrative to explore questions of social justice, inequality, and resilience.
Ordinary Distance – Waju James
An Ordinary Distance is a short film about the gap that opens between friends – not through anger or betrayal – but through the ordinary, invisible weight of life going differently for two people at the same time.
Waju is a Nigerian-born photographer and emerging filmmaker based in Dublin, Ireland. With a visual practice shaped behind the lens and a performance background rooted in stage productions in Ukraine, he brings a distinctive, multi-disciplinary sensibility to his storytelling.
Daisy: Prophet of the Apocalypse
Daisy: Prophet of the Apocalypse is an experimental mockumentary that follows a trans preacher, Daisy, as she prophesies the end of the world, promising salvation only to those who embrace monstrosity.
Venus Patel is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist working across film, visual arts, and theatre. Her work proposes the deconstruction of boundaries and unleashing hidden and erased histories. She relies on the absurd, the fantastical, and the monstrous to create speculative realities for Queer/POC liberation. Her work has exhibited across Ireland and her films have screen in festivals internationally.
sete – Marcello Fidelis
An immigrant has up to seven years to be able to find a job that sponsors their stay so to have a stable life in this country. This is one of many stories where work is the problem.
Marcello Fidelis, born in João Pessoa, Paraiba, Brasil, is a multidisciplinary artist working in film and theatre. He has a Master of Arts in Film and Creative Media and has been working in the Irish film industry since 2017. He has directed and produced several short films, CAFUNÉ*, the PAINTING (“or How to Deal with Your Dog’s Death”), sete, and the winner of GORM’s Close-Up Residency of 2025, Go Home. He is currently writing a play for The Baptiste Programme for the Smock Alley Theatre as one of the four writers chosen for the 2026 cohort.
Why the Sun & Moon Live in the Sky – Aisha Bolaji
Living in the mundane suburbia of a small Irish town, teens Diana and Sol plan to escape by building a spacecraft and living in the sky. When doubt starts to set in, they have to decide whether to pursue their dream or remain in their familiar world and face the inevitable.
Aisha Bolaji (she/they) is a Nigerian-Irish creative making their mark as a filmmaker showcasing their distinct creative vision rooted in fun and fantasy. They graduated from The National Film School, IADT with a specialisation in Fiction Direction and Production. Their short film, ‘Why the Sun & Moon Live in the Sky’ premiered at the Galway Film Fleadh where Aisha was nominated for the Bingham Ray New Talent Award. It has screened at the Cork International Film Festival, Aesthetica Short Film Festival, BlackStar Film Festival. The film was nominated for Best Irish Short Film at the Kinsale Shark Awards and won Best First Time Director at Catalyst Film Festival and Kosice Film Festival.
Out of Shadows – Pradeep Mahadeshwar
Out of Shadows is a performance-based experimental short documentary that envisions decolonising the colonial aesthetic of “Documentary” and explores the lives of three queer immigrants living with HIV in Ireland.
Pradeep Mahadeshwar (he/they) is a Dublin-based filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist from India whose work explores migration, language, queer identity, and intercultural storytelling. Working across illustration, writing, film and performance-led visual practices, Pradeep centres the lived experiences of LGBTQIA+ people of colour in Ireland within broader transnational contexts. They are passionate about creating inclusive and safe spaces for LGBTQIA+ migrants to explore their identities. He is the founder of Queer Asian Pride Ireland and the Queer Spectrum Film Festival (QSFF). Through QSFF, Pradeep aims to expand access to cinema for migrant and QPoC communities – on screen, behind the camera, and in front of it.
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