Events

A reading group organised by Alisa Oleva, hosted by FIELDNOTES involving a collective urban reading of texts about darkness as the sun sets and the street lamps turn on.This is an invitation to bring a text you have about darkness, darkness and the city, darkness and nature, darkness and walking etc (article, poem, book, social media post, sms, letter, song, absolutely anything) for collective reading in a public space. You are also welcome to come without a text and just read together/listen/respond. We will meet at sunset and read together as darkness descends. This is a FREE event but spaces are limited, please only book if you are able to attend.

Join us for the second in a series of live events taking place across London this summer! FIELDNOTES Live is a new programme bringing together artists and writers working across sonic and textual terrains. We will be presenting ideas that are coming-into-being, poetic excavations and aural interventions. This event is hosted by our friends at Spanners by Loughborough Junction, one of the best clubs in town! The evening will include noise, spoken narrative, synths, soundscapes, atmospheric phenomena and a tidal chorus.

Performers: Adrienne Herr, Agnieszka Szczotka, Dan Rhys Wakefield, victor_a

Join us for the third in our series of workshops investigating the language of memory, with a focus on process, practice and conversation. This workshop will consider how the river manifests as a system of memory or material witness to events. Walking along the banks of the Thames at low tide we will attend to its movements, collect the artefacts it produces and write along its tidelines. Together we will engage with a series of readings and prompts, testing new techniques of notation and exploring experimental modes of writing. Acts of poetic excavation will lead us to envision possible histories and futures for this shifting body of water. We will encounter artists and writers such as Daniel Kramb, Nikolai Bendix, Etel Adnan, WG Sebald, Roni Horn, Peter Hujar and Chris Marker. We welcome participants of all levels of experience, from all backgrounds and across all disciplines. Writing materials will be provided.

Join us for the second in our series of watching and writing sessions investigating the language of memory, with a focus on process, practice and conversation. Hosted by the wonderful House of Annetta in Tower Hamlets, London. Films and texts will provide departure points for poetic enquiries into themes of record and reality, fiction and forgetting, emergence and erasure. A series of writing prompts will take us through systems of notation, memory palaces, dissident archives, hive minds and redacted records as we consider how our writing is shaped by and shapes our memories. We welcome participants of all levels of experience, from all backgrounds and across all disciplines. Writing materials and refreshments will be provided.

Join us for the first in a series of live events taking place across London this summer! FIELDNOTES Live is a new programme bringing together artists and writers working across sonic and textual terrains. We will be presenting ideas that are coming-into-being, poetic excavations and aural interventions. This event is hosted by our friends at the wonderful Horse Hospital in Bloomsbury. The evening will include performances, readings, film, fragmentations, soundscapes and stereo fields.

Performers: Titus Barker, Knee Gnaw, Yan Wai Yin, Rouzbeh Shadpey

We are marking the spring equinox with a one-off online reading and writing workshop. This is the second iteration in our CALENDRICS series of workshops, exploring rhythm, ritual and units of measure as structures to write with/in. Reflecting on time, duration and methods of notation across fiction, memoir, poetics and between, the session will  focus on conversation and experimentation rather than final outcomes. Starting with the calendar as an organising principle we will look to historic examples from medieval books of hours to astronomical charts. We will move through diaristic experiments and quotidian forms across genres to test new modulations of metre and measure. The workshop will be structured around a series of readings, group discussion and writing exercises.

We welcome applications from participants of all levels of experience, from all backgrounds and across all disciplines.

A reading group organised by Alisa Oleva, hosted by FIELDNOTES. The After Dark Reading Club will involve a collective reading of texts about darkness as the sun sets and the street lamps turn on. The club is an invitation to bring a text about darkness for a collective reading in a public space. The text might be about darkness and the city, darkness and nature, darkness and walking, etc. The text might be an article, a poem, a story, a book, a social media post, a letter, a song, it might be something you have written or something encountered. We will meet at sunset and read together for about an hour as darkness descends and then go somewhere indoors nearby to get warm and discuss the readings.

This is a FREE event but spaces are limited, please only book if you are able to attend.

This informal group will focus on thinking through alternative models of teaching and learning. We will be paying particular attention to arts-based education but the group is open to anyone working within a learning environment in any capacity. We will read some critical pedagogy texts, including excerpts from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) and Felicity Allen’s Education Reader (2011), in conjunction with the bureaucratic texts and paperwork that are encountered within the fields of formal and academic learning (such as learning outcomes, course handbooks, schemes of work). Can we read the paperwork of our jobs differently (together, in turns, backwards…)? There is no expectation to read anything beforehand, it will all be read together during the session. This is an opportunity to be part of a community which aims to continue to share ideas about teaching.

This is a FREE event but spaces are limited, please only book if you are able to attend.

BECOMING-MACHINE will explore thresholds and co-evolutions between human and machinic languages. Together we will test the creative capacity of collaborative, combinatory and cumulative writing models in order to advance radical poetic practices, new language-worlds and innovative methods of inter-authorship. The workshop will involve individual and collaborative writing exercises, group readings and discussion. We welcome applications from participants of all levels of experience, from all backgrounds and across all disciplines.

Application deadline: 30 October 2024

Join us for a two-part online writing workshop exploring the idea of the game as method. An enquiry into the mechanisms of game-playing and language-games will lead us through structures of probability, possibility, performativity and poetics towards new words and worlds. We will think through complex systems of interaction, and across individual and collective exercises we will test rule-based combinatory and computational writing processes. The sessions will explore a range of approaches from ciphers, metafictions, extra-linguistic communication, environmental storytelling, anonymity, role-play, performativity, avatars and appropriative techniques. We will look to writers, poets, artists and theorists, such as Kathryn Scanlan, Donald Barthelme, Anne Carson, Adam Chodzko and RD Laing, to guide experiments along the edges of language, communication and meaning.

We welcome participants of all levels of experience, from all backgrounds and across all disciplines.

Join us for a watching and writing session investigating the language of memory, with a focus on process, practice and conversation. Films and texts will provide departure points for poetic enquiries into themes of record and reality, fiction and forgetting, emergence and erasure. A series of writing prompts will take us through systems of notation, memory palaces, dissident archives, hive minds and redacted records as we consider how our writing is shaped by and shapes our memories.

Join us for a writing workshop focused on process and poetics, hosted by the wonderful CCA Glasgow! In this workshop we will explore making meaning by turning towards and away from language. Through experimentation with systems of mark-making and notation, we will investigate the shapes and shades of meaning at the edge of language and understanding. Focusing on conversations and process rather than outcomes, a series of prompts will guide our writing towards performative world-building through the visual and sonic body of language.

Join us for our first event in Glasgow! A double launch at the wonderful Good Press. We will be launching FLOOD, a new zine documenting our workshop series between 2023-2024 which explored place-making poetics across coastal and riverside spaces in the South East of England, investigating the tensions underlying shifting landscapes, intertidal zones, living systems and anonymised processes of de/composition. The zine brings together prompts, references and outcomes from the series. There will be readings by FIELDNOTES friends and contributors including artists and writers Kate Paul and George Finlay Ramsay, introduced by FIELDNOTES Editor Bella Marrin. There will be drinks!

Join us for a workshop exploring cut-up and collage techniques for creating experimental new works between text and image. Starting with a range of textual and visual source materials we will follow a series of individual and collaborative prompts to explore the edges of language and to subvert ideas of authorship. We will focus on the balance between chaos and control as we advance new recombinatory systems of (dis)articulation and (de)composition in order to enter into surreal and poetic realms of meaning. We will be looking for new ideas between the loops of translation and the spaces of transition. By undoing and reassembling our materials we hope to reveal unexpected patterns and forms which might shape future ways of working.

Friends, join us for our first event in Berlin! Come raise a glass with us at the wonderful Hopscotch Reading Room. We will be launching the new issue of FIELDNOTES with readings from contributors and friends, including Elijah Jackson, Ella Lebeau reading for her father D.S. Marriott and Sam Cottington. This event is free and open to all, you are welcome to RSVP or just show up.

Join us for the fifth and final session of our FLOOD workshop series! In this session we will be walking on Rainham Marshes on the Thames Estuary in Essex, starting near Purfleet railway station. The aim of the FLOOD workshop series is to explore place-making poetics across coastal and riverside spaces in the South East of England, investigating the tensions underlying shifting landscapes, intertidal zones, living systems and anonymised processes of de/composition. Through a series of exercises and prompts participants will be encouraged to test experimental strategies of site writing from psycho-geography and meta-fiction to eco-deviance and concrete poetry, with a focus on process and conversation rather than outcomes.

All levels of experience are warmly welcomed!

Join us for the second series Evening School: six online sessions structured around communal reading and writing, geared towards the creation and cultivation of new text-based works. The programme is aimed at emerging writers and artists with text-based practices. We welcome applications from participants of all levels of experience, from all backgrounds and across all disciplines. Together we will engage with a variety of works across genres and forms as a means of uncovering and unsettling intimacies and potencies in textual matter. With a focus on poetic experimentation, sessions will involve collective & independent exercises, shared readings and open discussion, with the purpose of generating new approaches and fostering future collaborations.

Participants are warmly welcomed from all time zones! Please check the conversion to your local time zone.

Our FLOOD workshop series is back! We’ll be returning to Two Tree Island in the Thames Estuary for a session exploring sonic and poetic terrains. Led by musician Rob Shuttleworth and the FIELDNOTES editors the workshop will test techniques of site writing and field recording. Whilst following a route through the area’s edgelands and saltmarshes we will consider how acts of mapping and mark-making also involve poetry and the performative, inviting participants to explore and envisage new techniques of notation. Independent and collective exercises will focus on experimentation and process rather than outcomes.

Material produced during the session will feed into the production of a new episode of our radio series SONIC COMMONS.

All levels of experience are warmly welcomed!

We’ll be launching our sixth issue at the wonderful Horse Hospital on the 5 April 2024, please come join us and raise a glass to celebrate! There will be readings from contributors to the issue including writer and artist Steven Emmerson alongside poet Kidist Amberber. This event is free and open to all but we welcome donations from those who are able to give. Please help us to support Save the Children’s Fundraiser for Gaza, find out more and donate here.

This issue of FIELDNOTES has been supported by Arts Council England.

This session will investigate the language of memory, with a focus on process, practice and conversation. The group will read texts aloud and discuss collectively, between moments of guided writing. Themes of record and reality, fiction and forgetting, will shape an exploration of what the filmmaker and writer Trinh T. Minh-ha has termed ‘the fold of the known’: the narrative tension between knowing and unknowing. Together we will read excerpts from: ‘Venus, In Two Acts’ by Saidiya Hartman; Self Portrait in Green by Marie NDiaye; and Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

Join us for the inaugral series of Evening School: six online sessions structured around communal reading and writing, geared towards the creation and cultivation of new text-based works. The programme is aimed at emerging writers and artists with text-based practices. We welcome applications from participants of all levels of experience, from all backgrounds and across all disciplines. Together we will engage with a variety of works across genres and forms as a means of uncovering and unsettling intimacies and potencies in textual matter. With a focus on poetic experimentation, sessions will involve collective & independent exercises, shared readings and open discussion, with the purpose of generating new approaches and fostering future collaborations.

Participants are warmly welcomed from all time zones! Please check the conversion to your local time zone.

A day-long improvisation performance workshop exploring power, intimacy and performance. The day will begin with facilitated exercises drawing on the ‘status transaction’ games developed by Keith Johnstone in his 1999 book Impro for Storytellers. All levels of experience are warmly welcomed, although some degree of comfort with performingin front of a small group would be beneficial! The workshop will provide a supportive context for experimentation and will be focused on process over outcomes.

Free spaces are also available for unwaged participants, please get in touch with us at info@fieldnotes.site to recieve a code. Materials, refreshments and lunch will be provided and are included in the ticket cost. Please visit the event page for more details about accessibility and feel free to get in touch with any queries: info@fieldnotes.site

Join us at Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre (BOARC) in December for a residential workshop focused on process and poetics. BOARC is a self-organising study site for research, communality and experimentation near Birkenhead / Liverpool.

To mark the pagan festival of Saturnalia and the nearing winter solstice we will be exploring rhythm and ritual in our writing. Starting with the calendar as an organising principle, together we will explore different units of measure as structures to write with/in. Reflecting on time, duration and memory, with a focus on conversation and experimentation rather than final outcomes, the workshop will be structured around a series of exercises proposing formal constraints and prompts with the aim of generating new ideas and approaches to writing. We will look for inspiration at theorists and poets such as Giorgio Agamben, Lauren Berlant, CAConrad and Bernadette Mayer.

Led by Ren Ebel and Chris Kraus, this workshop will will feature readings from both writers followed by group writing games and discussion. An assignment – conceived impromptu on the basis of participant interests – will be given at the end of the first session. Session two will be spent in reading and discussion. A short preliminary reading from Dorothy Richardson’s novel The Tunnel (UK, 1919) will be distributed before the first session. The workshop will take place in two parts on consecutive Sundays with the same group, ticket price includes entry to both sessions. Writer and non-writers welcome!

Join us for the third  session of our walking/writing workshop series FLOOD delivered in partnership with Cement Fields. In this session we’ll be walking around the Isle of Sheppey. Starting near the station of Sheerness and finishing in the Bluetown Heritage Centre Tea Room.

The aim of this workshop series is to explore place-making poetics across coastal and riverside spaces in the South East of England, investigating the tensions underlying shifting landscapes, intertidal zones, living systems and anonymised processes of de/composition. 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, Localgiving and the Postcode Society Trust.

This workshop is part of Newham Poetry Festival 2023. In this session we will explore making meaning by turning towards and away from language. Through experimenting with systems of mark-making and notation, we will investigate the shapes and shades of meaning at the edge of language. Focusing on conversations and processes rather than outcomes, a series of prompts will guide our writing towards performative world-building through the visual and sonic body of language. With the aim of generating new ideas and approaches to writing, we will look for inspiration at references such as Riddley Walker by Russel Hoban, alongside writing and drawing by Travis Jeppesen, Renee Gladman and Mirtha Dermisache.

Refreshments and materials provided. All levels of experience are warmly welcomed! Tickets to this workshop include free entry to the rest of Newham Poetry Festival taking place at Stratford Library between 1-7 pm.

A workshop led by Rob Shuttleworth, an artist and musician whose approach to music and sound is based on finding ways of translating and understanding experiences with an emphasis on place and time. Starting from Fieldnotes HQ in Stratford the workshop will engage with the local area and architecture, exploring forgotten or overlooked locations and using them to produce sound and listening experiments. All levels of experience are welcome. Refreshments and materials will be provided. Please contact us with any queries about access requirements.

This event is FREE for Newham residents as well as those who are in reciept of Universal Credit, Disability Living Allowance or any other kind of income support and those on minimum wage. Please contact us to recieve a discount code.

In our first film night at The Cube we are bringing together three works which invite the viewer into intimate encounters with internal worlds, the screen becomes a skin which is touched, is touching. The audience becomes a co-conspirator, complicit in the construction of these spaces and presences which are arranged between the real and the imagined. Like three islands these filmic landscapes are connected underneath.

This event is FREE for those who are in receipt of Universal Credit, Disability Living Allowance or any other kind of income support and those on minimum wage. Please contact us via info@fieldnotes.site to receive a discount code.

Join us for the second session of our walking/writing workshop series FLOOD delivered in partnership with Cement Fields. In this session we’ll be walking through the area between the south side of the Queen Elizabeth II bridge and the village of Greenhithe.

The aim of this workshop series is to explore place-making poetics across coastal and riverside spaces in the South East of England, investigating the tensions underlying shifting landscapes, intertidal zones, living systems and anonymised processes of de/composition. 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, Localgiving and the Postcode Society Trust

Please join us for an evening of analogue solidarity! This event is a fundraiser in aid of Sirkhane Darkroom a project teaching analogue film processes to displaced children living on the Syrian/Turkish border. We will be celebrating all kinds of lo-fi DIY image production.

This event is an open invite to the analogue community and all celluloid lovers, bring your lightboxes, 8 mm, 16 mm and 35 mm projectors and share your work with us! We will have a 35 mm slide projector running so slides images are warmly welcomed. The evening will also feature works by Asli Baykall, Raf Fellner, Rob Shuttleworth and Margaret Tait .

If you would like to share your work on the night please follow this link to send us a proposal. We can offer goodwill and general support but we won’t be able to provide equipment, transport or specialised technical advice. You will need to be able to bring and operate your equipment yourself, all participants will be responsible for taking care of their own work.

A writing workshop exploring rhythm and ritual. Starting with the calendar as an organising principle, together we will explore different units of measure as structures to write with/in. Reflecting on time, duration and memory, with a focus on conversation and experimentation rather than final outcomes, the session will be structured around a series of exercises proposing formal constraints and prompts with the aim of generating new ideas and approaches to writing. We will look for inspiration at references such as the book of hours the Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry alongside theorists and poets such as Giorgio Agamben, Lauren Berlant, CAConrad and Bernadette Mayer. All levels of experience are warmly welcomed. Refreshments and materials will be provided. There is step-free access to both the office and the island. Please contact us with any queries about access requirements.

This event is FREE for Newham residents as well as those who are in receipt of Universal Credit, Disability Living Allowance or any other kind of income support and those on minimum wage. Please contact us to recieve a discount code.

Placemaking poetics workshop run by FIELDNOTES as part of the Essex Book Festival 2023.

This is 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 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 welcome. Please contact us with any queries about access requirements.

Supported by Arts Council England, Localgiving and the Postcode Society Trust.

We’ll be launching our fifth issue at the wonderful South London Gallery on the 8 June, please come join us to celebrate! The event will take place in the Clore Studio and the beautiful Orozco Garden. There will be drinks!

We will be joined by contributors to the issue including the artist Philip Ewe who will be giving a performance and we will be showing the work Steve Hates Fish by the artist filmmaker John Smith.

Accessibility: The venue is on ground floor level with a disabled toilet. Please get in touch with any access requirements so that we can do our best to accomodate them! Email us at info@fieldnotes.site

This issue of FIELDNOTES has been supported by Arts Council England, Cockayne Grants for the Arts and The London Community Foundation.

Offprint website

A workshop led by Rob Shuttleworth, an artist and musician whose approach to music and sound is based on finding ways of translating and understanding experiences with an emphasis on place and time. Starting from Fieldnotes HQ in Stratford the workshop will engage with the local area, exploring forgotten or overlooked locations and using them to produce sound and listening experiments. All levels of experience are welcome. Refreshments and materials will be provided. Please contact us with any queries about access requirements.

This event is FREE for Newham residents as well as those who are in reciept of Universal Credit, Disability Living Allowance or any other kind of income support and those on minimum wage. Please contact us to recieve a discount code.

Join us for the launch of ZONING, a zine exploring techniques of place-based writing.

The publication documents a series of writing workshops run by Fieldnotes across London in 2022. The workshops experimented with methods such as concrete poetry, psychogeography and frottage as means of mapping the urban landscape, creating systems of observation and notation. Drawing from works by writers including Robert Walser, Georges Perec, Kōbō Abe, Raymond Queneau and Anne Carson a number of prompts were devised for each workshop location which participants responded to. The publication includes a selection of these exercises, responses and reference materials which combine to produce an alternative or aberrant map of London from Bloomsbury to Thamesmead.

Declan Wiffen will be reading from ‘Three Cruising Texts’ his contribution to Fieldnotes Issue 3. There will also be drinks and ‘exquisite corpse’ collaborative writing exercises for those who would like to take part. All materials will be provided. This is a free event, but booking is required. Spaces are limited!

Please join us to explore how (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals can help us see the creative viability in everything around us. CAConrad has created writing rituals using the night sky to design homemade star constellations, another ritual to dream with crows, and many others from talking with trees and ghosts, translating Shakespeare’s sonnets with crystals, and coping with the destroyed wilderness of our planet. The workshop will take place in two parts on consecutive Sundays with the same small group. All backgrounds and levels of experience are welcome!

Friends in North America join us for our US launch of Issue 4 in New York! We’ll be hosted by the wonderful Aeon Bookstore in Lower East Side Manhattan. We will be joined by poets Will Alexander and Cedar Sigo who will be reading their work from the new issue. Aeon Bookstore is on a basement level, only accessible via flight of stairs, please contact us with any queries about access requirements.

For FIELDNOTES’ first film night at The Horse Hospital we present two films exploring the relationships between species viewed through the prisms of domination and desire. Both works connect violence, landscape and care; merging documentary and fictional modes to produce strange new intimacies.

O Peixe [The fish], Jonathas de Andrade, 16 mm transferred to HD, 23 minutes
SaF05, Charlotte Prodger, HD video, 39 minutes

This event takes its title from the book of the same name by Katherine Scanlan. This unsettling short story collection exploring the inner lives of animals and humans is our recommended reading for the evening. The Horse Hospital screening room is on the basement level, accessed via a ramp, please contact us with any queries about access requirements.

Join us for the final session of our ZONING writing workshop series! This time we’ll be starting and finishing the workshop at our new HQ in Warton House, Stratford. The event is part of the Open House Festival programme, a two week celebration of London’s housing, architecture and neighbourhoods.

This is 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 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.

Join artist Michelle Williams Gamaker and Fieldnotes Editor Bella Marrin for a discussion around Michelle’s work exploring strategies of restaging and legacies of imperial violence. We’ll watch extracts from Michelle’s films which develop the idea of ‘fictional activism’: the restoration of marginalised brown characters as central figures, who return in her works as vocal brown protagonists challenging the fictional injustices to which they have been historically consigned.

Using the methods of ‘cameraless’ photography we’ll be creating ‘found’ poetry by collaging images and text to create new authorless works. The process will be collaborative and chaotic, we expect the outcomes to be surreal, deranged and disjointed. Scissors, glue and material to cut will be provided, please bring destructive/creative energy.

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