National Poetry Library, Southbank centre, London
06/09/2023
A performance reading for Special Edition: Reading & Sounding
An event curated by Iris Colomb, exploring text and sound through performances by three artist-poets: Camilla Nelson, Nicola Woodham and Emmanuelle Waeckerlé.
My first attempt at performing some of the textual traces generated during Walking in Air fieldwork.
For this occasion I worked with an edited version of preliminary and concluding thoughts about my first ever Walking in Air fieldwork (Whitehorse Meadow in Thornton Heath, January 2021), as well as the transcript of the recording of my thinking aloud while walking.
This is a recording of the reading.
breath in 1 2 3 breath out 123
"This afternoon I am going to walk alone with my mind’s eyes and feet ears, intent on absorbing all that I can of my surroundings. I will be mindful of the fact that it is our careless over exploitation of everything on and in earth that caused the contagious toxicity of the air in and around me as well as the polluted state of the ground beneath my feet. " (extract of preliminary thoughts)
Details and traces of this first preliminary fieldwork are here.
They appear in Walking in Air, Performance Research ‘On Air’, Vol 26 issue 7 (2022)
Walking in Air
An interdisciplinary project that encompasses walking, writing, thinking, music, performance and discussion. Drawing on Tim Ingold’s suggestion that ‘knowledge is formed along paths of movement in the weather-world’, the project considers walking in air to be a model for speculative thinking, for creative activity and for reconsidering our place within the natural environment. Participants are drawn from an international pool of composers, artists and poets.
A collaboration with Will Montgomery building on the rich body of poetry-music-environment encounters generated by the tradition of text scores inaugurated by the Fluxus movement as well as as composers such as John Cage, Cornelius Cardew, Pauline Oliveiros and Annea Lockwood to name a few.