AA auditorium, Bedford Square, London
02/12/2025
A talk and a collective performance, part of Writing With: Transversal Stories and Voices
An event curated by Marina Lathouri and Sokbom Hong, in relation to the exhibition
The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K. Le Guin, in the AA Gallery (10/10 to 6/12 2025).
Readwalking
Two words brought together to describe a simultaneous act of reading and walking, of reading as walking, of walking as reading, of sounding a text about walking, step by step, one word calling the other, following one’s senses, like Thoreau.
A direction out there, readwalking with Thoreau (MA BIBLIOTHEQUE, 2021) brings together a prepared text, a text score and essays by Michael Hampton and Vicky Smith.
The open score is based on a radical pruning of David Henri Thoreau’s transcendental essay about walking (1851). Footnotes provide suggestions on how to speak, sing, sound the remaining words, alone or with others, inside or outside.
This was the first public reading involving an audience, I usually readwalk with musicians, or other writers/readers. With an ensemble of 12 volonteer readwalkers (voice, little stones) we read from and through the first 8 pages of the prepared text projected on 3 screens so that the rest of the audience could also take part.
Emmanuelle Waeckerlé’s score lifts the materiality of the text out of its ordinary fusion with the flows of meaning and rumination. Read-walking Thoreau, even in one’s own mind, has the salutary effect of an acupuncture of the spacetime of reading. (Cécile Malaspina)
Images taken by Maria Anna Kaprara
The aim of the event was to explore how collective, relational and performative acts of reading and writing can challenge established discursive forms and create space for plural, nonlinear and embodied approaches to shaping the world.
A direction out there – readwalking (with) Thoreau CD is available here
A direction out there – readwalking (with) Thoreau book is available here
Shortlisted for the Sound Walk September Awards 2021.
Read Pruning Thoreau, written for the occasion here