Emmanuelle
Waeckerlé

Emmanuelle Waeckerlé is a London based academic, artist, composer and improviser interested in the materiality and musicality of language.

Her practice evolves across multiple interconnected work zones – conceptual writing, performance, new musical composition, artist-publishing – and manifests as poetic scores, occasions for their activation (installation, performance, workshop) and resulting image, text or sound works.

Ultimately devising situations to deepen our connection to or play (with) our interior or exterior landscape and each other, through or beyond words.

Emmanuelle understands walking reading and writing as simultaneous acts of marking and reading (space), be it a page or a path, inspired by the notion of a ballad, which in French is both a song and a walk. SLOW MARCH (2001), roadworks (1996/98), JUNGLE FEVER (2011), PRAELUDERE (2013), A direction out there – readwalking (with) Thoreau (2021), Walking in Air (2021 – ongoing).

Other projects are based on appropriation through (re)writing or reading of literary works. Reading (story of) O (Uniformbooks, 2015), Ode (owed) to O (Edition Wandelweiser, 2017), Black and Blue (2020), Song of an Intention (2019),  Still Light (2020), and Readwalking (with) thoreau (2021).

Emmanuelle is a long standing attendee of Eddie Prevost’s legendary London Improvisation Workshop,  and co-founder of Bouche Bée improvising duo with Petri Huurinainen (guitar) and occasional guests.

She curates the house concert series Cosy Nook since 2016 as well as the here.here series since 2018, in collaboration with Harry Whalley.

She has been involved in numerous collaborations, some long standing: Petri Huurinainen, Sebastian Lexer, Will Montgomery, Marianne Schuppe, Yifeat Ziv, Nathan Moore to name a few.

She is regularly solicited for mentoring and offers tailored opportunities, online or in house, to deepen, refresh or expand one’s practice: with a focus on experimental, multidisciplinary, performative and relational practices across fine art, conceptual writing, experimental music and extended, textual or visual scores. She is one of the pillars of the Wandelweiser Composer Meet Composer mentoring project.

In many of the festivals and institutions dealing with Live Art and experimental music in the UK and abroad. She is regularly invited to run performance workshops; Marres house for contemporary culture, Maastricht (2018), N.I.D Ahmedabad (2013), Beaux Arts/ ENSA, Limoges (2018), Tate Modern (2018), to name a few recent ones.

She exhibits occasionally nationally and internationally, and her artist’s books are held in many public collections including V&A, Tate Britain, the Poetry Library at SouthBank Centre, The Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Centre Des Livres d’Artistes, Printed Matters, PS1, Chelsea school of Art, UWE, University of Dundee Museum. 

Her imprint MOIedition gathers her self-published artist publications, text scores and other multiples since 2001. Between 2007 and 2015 she was part of the small team running the Centre des Livres d’Artistes in St Yrieix, France.

Emmanuelle is a member of the Wandelweiser international network. Her music and scores are distributed by Edition Wandelweiser.

She has been greatly influenced by her annual encounters (at Die Station Austria between 2006 and 2013) and subsequent friendships with a few core members of  this fluid community of composers, musicians and artists. Antoine Beuger, Marcus Kaiser, Sandra Schimag, Christoph Nicholas, Michael Pisaro, Jürg Frey and Andre o. Müller. 

In 2017 her double CD Ode (owed) to O was released and performed at Klangraum in Düsserldorf (July 2017), Café Oto (Feb 2018), Constellation in Chicago (April 18) with a•pe•ri•od•ic ensemble and at A place to Listen concert series by APTL ensemble in Victoria, (British Columbia, Canada in January 2019). She recently released her second CD a direction out there, readwalking (with) Thoreau. (2021)

 (aka cassland & co)
A house concert series in a small cove in South London, where we come together, to play, listen to and share words, sounds and other gems, polished or unpolished. Cassland & co became Cosy Nook in 2017, the name of a rocky bay littered with gem stones smoothed by the fierce tidal waters of New Zealand South Island that I first visited in 2016. Antoine Beuger, Marie-Cécile Reber, Antonio Acunzo, Marianne Schuppe, Stefan Thut, Marcus Kaiser, Nomi Epstein, Bin Li, Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti, Thea Mesirow and Aaron Foster Breilyn, Artur Vidal, Seamus Cater etc..

A collaboration between bookRoom and the Audio Research Cluster at UCA Farnham, curated with Harry Whalley, around our common research and interest in extended, textual, visual, gestural and object scores and ways to integrate or experience technology in text / music  / film / performances. The project is supported by UCA research fund. 3 or 4 concerts per year around a guest composer, taking place in Farnham and in London at Iklektik. Seamus Cater (Feb/May 2022), Parkinson Saunders (May 2021) Voice & Electronics with Sadd, Moore, Waeckerlé and Ziv (April 2021), Greg Caffrey (IE, March 2021), Marie Cécile Reber (CH, Feb 2020), Gildas Quartet (UK, Oct 2019), Marcus Kaiser (DE, May 2019), Stefan Thut (CH, April 2019), Jessica Aslan and Emma Lloyd (UK, March 2019).

In Fine Art and Relational Practices at University for the Creative Arts (Farnham campus) and director of bookRoom research and publishing platform since 2009,  engaged with editorial, curatorial and critical research through a number of interrelated activities; conferences, study days, publishing, book fairs, research degrees, a collection.

Workshop (BtBtW, since 2008) proposes performative and improvisational strategies to deepen connection to one’s body and senses and develop individually and collectively one’s creativity and thinking (speculative, non-linear, intuitive, risk taking).

This workshop has initially been developed for BA and MA photography students at UCA Farnham, to experience first-hand the tools and grammar of Performance Art relevant to the still and moving image. Also given at Southbank University (2012 to 2014), Norwich school of art (2018, 2022). A 2 weeks version has been given to a group of postgraduate design students at NID Ahmedabad (2013).