MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE
28/09/2021
A pocket size book
bringing together a prepared text, a text score and two essays by Michael Hampton and Vicky Smith
Readwalking
describes a simultaneous act of reading and walking: reading as walking, of walking as reading, of reading a text about walking, step by step, putting one foot in front of the other, each word calling the next, following one’s instinct or senses, as one is going along a reading path, as Thoreau writes, always going west, sauntering, readwalking as if one’s life depended on it…
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
Paperback - 92 pages - 105 mm x 170 mm x 60 mm French flaps (cover) - ISBN 978-1-910055-85-4
A reading path
Walking, Henry David Thoreau’s transcendental lecture/essay (1851), has become after pruning, conceptual poetry with an accompanying score for reading, walking, speaking, singing, playing. A reading path leads through Thoreau’s words, keeping a trace of the original text as the visible root of my rewilding; this mise en abyme reveals endless potential paths.
An insightful and considered review by Levi Sherman on artistsbooksreview.com here
Thoreau’s elegant writing pulls the reader back into the original essay and Waeckerlé’s own selection can divert the readwalker from their chosen instructions. This is not a failure, but rather the very essence of readwalking. The text is like a trail, something to follow but also to add to, stray from, or otherwise alter. Levi Sherman
Another insightful review in Thoreau Society Bulletin (Number 323, Fall 2023) connecting the prepared text (the book) and its sonic rendition (the cd) as so many ways of ‘ mining and speaking the words of bruised Nature, in her/my mother tongue ‘.
Recording as part of an improvised reading ensemble with Iris Colomb, Ed Shipsey, Emmanuelle Waeckerle, and Florence Uniacke on a cold winter’s night around a kitchen table in Lewisham in February 2022.
A direction out there – readwalking (with) Thoreau is available here
Produced with financial support from UCA research fund.
Shortlisted in the Sound Walk September Awards 2021. Read Pruning Thoreau written for the occasion here.