Libraries of Walks, Shorelines, Haiku Encounter, Sauntering Verse, In a different LENS & International Analogio Festival locative literature projects
An online panel with Stefaan van Biesen, Elspeth (Billie) Penfold, Andrew Stuck, Babak Fakhamzadeh, Lucy Jeffery, Sissy Papathanassiou and Geert Vermeire.
Can we shape a (digital) literary form using the world around us? What happens to literature when a reader is mobile?
A talk about locative literature projects, including projects initiated at the Analogio Festival in the last years, in which writers create original stories that respond to the presence of a reader and to places, or explore how ubiquitous technologies found within smartphones can allow us to produce literary augmented works.
In pandemic times new projects were developed involving literature and (limitations of) space, often at the same time locally and globally, and often exploring the potential of new technologies and through collaborative-collective actions.
Stefaan van Biesen creates collaborative libraries of (mind)walks – overlapping outdoors and indoors in his Library of Walks.
Elspeth (Billie) Penfold gathers writers and artists in her walking practice Thread and Word, to weave text and space together with CGeomap in In a different LENS.
Andrew Stuck is initiator of Shorelines, a global crowd sourced project in the frame of Sound Walk September, bringing together writers, reciters and places in locative maps. As well of Haiku Encounter, inspiring people to discover their city on foot.
Babak Fakhamzadeh’s Sauntering verse generates Dadaist poetry based on your physical location. Poetry created in front of your eyes during a walk.
Dr Lucy Jeffery (Mid Sweden University) is co-organizer, together with Professor Vicky Angelaki, of the upcoming online conference A New Poetics of Space: Literary Walks in times of Pandemics and Climate Change, in Sweden on December 7th.
The Analogio Festival initiated the project Libraries as Gardens in 2018, and collected and distributed poems during the pandemic, read by their authors at home, creating new mindspaces during lockdown.
Geert Vermeire elaborated Libraries as Gardens in 2020, as an invitation to record in home reading spaces – collecting silences, memories and texts about gardens and walks- with the objective to create sound walks in gardens after the pandemic.
After a short presentation of the above projects the speakers engage in a conversation about literature and how words becomes (new) spaces.
Friday, 25 September 2020 at 1900-2100 BST
Hosts
Related
Libraries as Gardens – sound walk in Athens
The National Garden of Athens hosts an interactive audio project featuring global participants sharing stories and readings about their favorite public gardens during the pandemic, accessible via a mobile webapp or desktop map. This evolving sound walk includes lockdown silence recordings and aims to create a geolocated audio archive of personal and public garden experiences before, during, and after COVID-19.
• Squatting and Common Land in Hackney
What has encouraged the rise in squatting today – what are the political, economic and legislative currents that encouraged this, and what is the impact of squatting not just in its immediate locale, but also across our collective culture? Who should care if it is on the increase? All this and much more was revelaed in Melissa Bliss’ Squatting and the Common Land walk co-produced by Andrew Stuck at the Museum of Walking.
• Pandemic walking (seminar)
The Covid 19 crisis of 2020-21 has taken many names, including “The Great Pause.” It has forced us to halt our usual habit patterns and critically reflect on how we conduct our daily lives. New forms of movement and sociability have emerged in the wake of this global pandemic. Why and how do people develop
• +2 Street Haunting: Reflections on staying at home and walking the city
Johanna Steindorf’s audio paper reflects on how pandemic-related sheltering in place has altered experiences of staying at home and walking in the city, drawing on Virginia Woolf’s and Xavier de Maistre’s writings. She discusses her artistic projects, including video and audio walks that explore mediated presences in urban spaces, examining their implications for understanding space and future experiences.
Mapping a digital quipu
Elspeth (Billie) Penfold is a textile artist who brings her experience of teaching and research into performative work. In 2012 she formed the arts group Thread and Word. Through call outs and personal invitation Elspeth works collaboratively with invited artists and academics to develop performative walks. Elspeth was born in Bolivia, and she likens the digital threading of texts with the physical threading of Andean quipus.
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