• A rock is semi submerged in a river, it is reflecting the light of the sun

    (SOMA)TIC POETRY RITUALS

    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!

    (SOMA)TIC POETRY RITUALS: More information & booking
  • A hand rest on a concrete wall alongside the inset detail of a hand carved into the wall

    ZONING ZINE LAUNCH

    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!

    ZONING ZINE LAUNCH: MORE INFORMATION & BOOKING
  • Abstract painting in bright green and red with bold brushstrokes

    FN004 LAUNCH (part II)

    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.

    FN004 LAUNCH (part II): RSVP
  • A slightly blurry image of the side of a lorry reflecting the red light of a traffic light and the blue light from the interior of a bar

    FN004 LAUNCH (part I)

    It is with much joy that we will be bringing our fourth issue into the world next month! We’ll be partnering with the wonderful Forma HQ in London who will be hosting us for a launch on the 3 November in their new bookshop Presse Books. We are privileged to be joined by the artist Agnieszka Szczotka who will be performing her text ‘The Deceiver’ from the new issue and Michael O’Mahony who will be presenting a series of animations also featured in FN004.
    Friends in London please join us! The event is free and open to all, you are welcome to RSVP or to just show up. Forma HQ is on the ground floor with a disabled toilet. If you have any questions or access requirements please email info@fieldnotes.site. There will be drinks.
    FN004 LAUNCH (part I): RSVP
  • A man with a snorkle on his head holds a fish against his bare chest in a loving embrace

    THE DOMINANT ANIMAL

    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.

    THE DOMINANT ANIMAL: More information & booking
  • A photo of a the edge of a basin of water, the edges are rusted metal and concrete blocks, there's a power cable hanging low above the water level

    ZONING V

    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.

    ZONING V: More information & booking
  • an installation image of a filming set, we can see a camera and lighting set up, behind this there is a projection of a person of Inupiat origin

    IN COVERSATION WITH MICHELLE WILLIAMS GAMAKER

    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.

    IN COVERSATION WITH MICHELLE WILLIAMS GAMAKER: More information & booking
  • A table spread with pages from magazines, photos and other colourful bits of paper for collaging

    CUT & COME AGAIN

    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.

    CUT & COME AGAIN: Supernormal website
  • An duotone image in pink and black of a smiling boy's face which is partly underwater

    SLOW COMPRESSION

    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.

    SLOW COMPRESSION: More information & booking
  • Documentation of a performance piece by by Gabriel Orozco, a large ball of plasticine the same weight as the artist has been rolled across the city collecting residues and traces, in this images it has just rolled across a grating in the gutter and hold the striped of its bars

    ZONING IV

    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.

    ZONING IV: *Sold out*
  • A photo of a hoarding covered in signs advertising english lessons, a blackboard reads 'Montaigne School of English'

    INTERPOETICS

    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.

    INTERPOETICS: More information & booking
  • An abstract photo of a building that has been reflected back upon itself creating ghostly reflection within the image

    ZONING III

    Join us for a site-specific writing workshop which will explore concepts related to collective memory, historicity and personal archives. Together, we will engage with the unique story of Pushkin House as well as the surrounding area of Bloomsbury, an area of social and literary significance. We will consider poetics and politics, narratives marginal to the historical record, and the ways in which the event is made manifest by different techniques and styles of writing.

    Using key texts and visual references as departure points, we will look at methods such as concrete poetry, psychogeography and frottage as ways of mapping and documenting experience. Through a series of short, informal exercises, participants will be encouraged to experiment, with a focus on process rather than outcome. All levels of experience are welcome. Refreshments and materials will be 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.

    ZONING III: *Sold out*
  • An image of the brutalist Thamesmead estate. A man with a cowboy hat stands on one of the concrete walkways.

    ZONING II

    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.

    ZONING II: *Sold out*
  • A birds eye view of Offprint publishers' fair in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall. Book stalls are surrounded by crowds of people.

    OFFPRINT

    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.

    OFFPRINT: Offprint website
  • A woman sit on a stool beside a desk cluttered with books and drawings, she leans her head on the window.

    BLOCK

    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.

    BLOCK: *Sold out*
  • A 16 mm film still of green algae

    FN003 LAUNCH (part II)

    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 EcodevianceThe 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.

    FN003 LAUNCH (part II): RSVP
  • A film still of a branch on which is growing a strange orange lichen, below a subtitle reads 'what is this thing?'

    FN003 LAUNCH (part I)

    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.

    FN003 LAUNCH (part I): Rile* event page
  • A close up of a print of The Garden of Earthly Delights showing cavorting naked figures and fruit.

    THE TOWN

    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.

    THE TOWN: *Sold out*
  • A woman leans against a tree, writing on a clipboard. she is surrounded by the high rise buildings of a South London estate

    ZONING I

    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.

    ZONING I: *Sold out*
  • A photo captures the reflection of the London skyline softly in warm yellow

    A GROUP NOVEL

    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).

    A GROUP NOVEL: *Sold out*
  • A grainy blue image of high rise buildings and a tree

    UNDERLINE

    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.

    UNDERLINE: More information & booking
  • An image of a woman writhing on the ground is superimposed over the image of a man's hand holding an eel above a vat

    THE GARDEN HAS GONE MAD

    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

    THE GARDEN HAS GONE MAD: *Sold out*