Kensington Gardens and Cornwall
08/09/2023 - 10/09/2023
local fieldwork and collective recollection (online)
With Robert Curgenven in Cornwall, and Will Montgomery and Emmanuelle Waeckerlè in Kensington Gardens, London
We undertook local fieldwork in two locations. Both were sites for Robert Curgenven Open Form Pavilion of Air project, which uses the Echoes geolocation audio app to fill demarcated locations with a pattern of tones. Movement within the chosen area triggers different sounds within the user’s headphones.
Will, his son Kip and myself walked in Kensington Gardens near the Serpentine Gallery and Robert walked in a location in Cornwall.
A few days later we gathered online to share and discuss traces and stories of our respective local ‘walking in air’ fieldwork.
recollection (online) - 21/09/2023, 5pm
To accept the ground./ To go to it as a question./ To open up the day inside the day,/ a bubble holding air/ bending the vista to it’. (Peter Gizzi, ‘Stung’, Sky Burial)
I mostly walked around a very big and old chestnut tree. This led to an audio recording of my thinking aloud, a transcription of it framed by two reflective texts and a video of my thinking aloud and whistlewalking under Robert’s Pavilion of Air.
Our traces of this ‘Walking in Air’ fieldwork are available on the Walking in Air website.
More on Robert Curgenven’s Open Form Pavilion of Air series here
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.