Events

We are looking forward to returning to the excellent Cafe Oto in July. Friends in London, join us for an evening of screenings, readings and performances!

SLOW COMPRESSION brings together a collection of works dealing with the distortion of language and sound as they pass through different systems of translation: encoding, compressing, transporting, indexes, ciphers and codecs. These works instigate new encounters as meaning is unsettled or misplaced. The event marks the launch of Fieldnotes/Sessions: a monthly programme of audio content published online and broadcast on Resonance 104.4FM. The programme echoes the focus of our print journal on formal and poetic innovation: its purpose is to provide a test site for ideas and research, a space for experimental modes and new prototypes. The evening will involve musicians, artists and writers whose work will be included in the Fieldnotes/Sessions programme – Mónica Rivas Velasquez, Frances Young, Yan Jun, Li Song, Holly Antrum and Billy Steiger.

A walking workshop exploring techniques of place-based writing. We will consider key texts and visual references as departure points, looking at methods such as concrete poetry, psychogeography and frottage as ways of mapping the urban landscape through graphic scores, typography and language. Whist walking through the local area we will consider how acts of mapping and mark-making also imbricate poetry and the performative, inviting participants to explore and envisage techniques of notation between writing and drawing. Through a series of short informal exercises participants will be encouraged to experiment, with a focus on process rather than outcomes. All levels of experience are welcome. Please contact us with any queries about access requirements.

Supported by Arts Council England, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Localgiving and the Postcode Society Trust.

We are very happy to be hosting a two-part online workshop led by the author Cecilia Pavón! With poets Lucas Olarte, Jacqueline Golbert, Julián Mesa and Perla Zúñiga.

If all poetry is about inventing a language within language, then the translation of a poem is always a reinvention and a creative misunderstanding. The four poets we will read and attempt to translate in this workshop take this principle to the extreme. Starting with the impossibility of using dictionaries, algorithms or AI to translate these poems, we will listen to the authors talk about their practices and their particular use of Spanish, and then together try to translate each poem into English. The workshop aims to prompt discussions on the potential of translation as a form of art, friendship and knowledge. The presentations of each of the poets will be in English and the poems to be translated will be provided in advance so that each participant can prepare beforehand and then discuss the different possibilities for (mis)translation with the other participants. All levels of experience are welcome, knowledge of Spanish is not required. Places are limited.

Join us in Thamesmead for a walking workshop exploring techniques of place-based writing. We will consider methods such as concrete poetry, psychogeography and frottage as ways of mapping the urban landscape and architecture through graphic scores, typography and language. Following a route through the centre of Thamesmead we will consider how acts of mapping and mark-making also involve poetry and the performative, inviting participants to explore and envisage techniques of notation between writing and drawing. We will look at references and texts from writers and poets including Robert Walser, Georges Perec, Kōbō Abe and Anne Carson. Through a series of short informal exercises participants will be encouraged to experiment, with a focus on process rather than outcomes. All levels of experience are welcome. Refreshments & materials provided. Please contact us with any queries about access requirements.

Supported by Arts Council England, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Localgiving and the Postcode Society Trust.

Offprint London returns to Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall for its sixth edition. From 13th to 15th May it will host independent experimental, and socially-engaged publishers in the fields of arts, architecture, design, humanities, and visual culture. Offprint is LUMA Foundation’s platform that supports qualitative and unique publishing practices specific to the arts.

In this workshop we celebrate the artist’s studio as a site of failure and frustration, reflecting on the role these play in creative process. Bringing together experiences of failure, desperation and frustrated intentions, we will consider how writing might be deployed as a medium or tool to en/counter creative blocks. Through a series of exercises and prompts that invite the incidence of error, divergence and misunderstanding, we will respond to the exhibition A Century of the Artist’s Studio and the different personalities and studio spaces it presents. We will subvert these interior worlds, using them as backdrops against which to write.Participants will be encouraged to experiment and collaborate by selecting between short and informal writing exercises with a focus on process rather than outcomes. All levels of experience are welcome: writers or artists, blocked or otherwise, aspiring or established, and anyone who feels they would like to write but is unsure of how to start. Refreshments & materials provided. Please contact us with any queries about access requirements.

Join us for the London launch of Issue 3 of FIELDNOTES at Tenderbooks on the 7 April! We are privileged to be joined in person by the poet CAConrad who will be performing their text from Issue 3 of FIELDNOTES and reading poems from their recent collection AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibrations.

CAConrad has been working with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. They are the author of AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (Wave Books, 2021). Other titles include While Standing in Line for Death and Ecodeviance. The Book of Frank is now available in 9 different languages. They received a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, a Lambda Literary Award, and a Believer Magazine Book Award. They teach at Columbia University in New York City and Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam.

We are looking forward to launching our third issue at the end of the month! We’ll be partnering with the wonderful Rile* in Brussels for an event on the 1 April where we’ll be joined in person by the artist and filmmaker George Finlay Ramsay and virtually by the poet CAConrad. We’ll be screening George Finlay Ramsay & Alexander Heatherington’s short film CASTOROCENE. Shifting between essay and semi-fictionalised nature documentary, CASTOROCENE is a ‘film pome’ dedicated to one of nature’s great architects. Depicting the wetlands as a living entity, the camera dwells on a landscape of viscous textures, organic debris and nonhuman sculptures, considering parities between acts of borrowing, rewilding and animal world building. The screening will be followed by a virtual performance from the poet CAConrad who will be reading their text from Issue 3 of FIELDNOTES, written in response to the film. There will be drinks.

Back due to popular demand! We are very happy to be hosting a second online writing workshop led by the author Lucy Ives in March.

In this two-part workshop, participants will collectively create a series of epistolary fictions, as well as a map of an imagined community, with its own social, spatial, ecological, and literary histories. We will be thinking through the ways in which collaborative writing practices and imaginative schemas can give rise to unforeseen conversations and worlds—some of which participants may wish to expand, beyond this exercise. We will also examine narrative’s relationship to this speculative society, particularly as we explore ways to reanimate and/or publish our group novel for a larger audience. Of particular interest to: fiction writers, poets, designers, the sociologically-minded, speculative historians and archive-workers, cartographers.

A walking workshop exploring techniques of place-based writing. We will consider key texts and visual references as departure points, looking at methods such as concrete poetry, psychogeography and frottage as ways of mapping the urban landscape through graphic scores, typography and language. Whist walking through the local area we will consider how acts of mapping and mark-making also involve poetry and the performative, inviting participants to explore and envisage techniques of notation between writing and drawing. Through a series of short informal exercises participants will be encouraged to experiment, with a focus on process rather than outcomes. All levels of experience are very welcome. Refreshments & materials provided. We will be starting and finishing in the Clore Studio at South London Gallery, please contact us with any queries about access requirements.

Supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Localgiving and the Postcode Society Trust.

We are very happy to be hosting a two-part online writing workshop led by the author Lucy Ives in December.

Lucy Ives is the author of two novels: Impossible Views of the World, published by Penguin Press and selected as a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World, published by Soft Skull Press and also a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Her short fiction is collected in the recent Cosmogony (Soft Skull Press, 2021).

FIELDNOTES has been commissioned by Tower Hamlets Council to run two creative writing workshops on the Isle of Dogs, London, as part of Open House Festival 2021. Open House is a citywide festival promoting access to London’s architectural sites. The workshops are part of a programme of events taking place along the ‘underline’ beneath the Docklands Light Railway. The workshops will explore the techniques of concrete poetry and psychogeography to map the viaduct area around South Quay and Crossharbour.

The workshops will take place over the weekend of 11-12 September 2021, they are free to attend & open to all. Refreshments & materials provided.

To coincide with the publication of our second issue we have organised an event with our friends at Cafe Oto who are hosting us for a short programme of screenings and performances from 7.30 pm on Thursday 29 July. The evening will include films and performances by Ana Vaz, Keira Greene, Zara Joan Miller and Ute Kanngeisser. This will be our first real world event, we’ll be selling both Issues 1 & 2 and looking forward to having some drinks on the terrace, come join us!

Evening, shortly. Outside, the woodlice/hold an amorous feast. And in the evening,/I am very over –

‘The Garden Has Gone Mad’, Miruna Fulgeanu, 2020