A note on: CROWD - the Omnibus Tour

Great to be part of CROWD's groundbreaking and ambitious European Omnibus tour across Europe this summer. It's a mad, brilliant project, huge swathes of poets in stints from northern Finland all the way down to Cyprus. Loads of wonderful people involved, and I get to travel from Graz to Belgrade over a week in late June. http://crowd-literature.eu/omnibus-2/

CROWD: A 3 month bus tour from May to August 2016, featuring around 100 authors from all over Europe in 15 European countries and more than 40 cities and about 24 associated organizers and dozens of local events.

Here's a feature on me on the CROWD site, with a short interview http://crowd-literature.eu/one-crowd-steven-j-fowler/

"There have always been interactions and disputes between the discourses of poetry and politics. Do you see possibilities of emancipatory strategies concerning contemporary interactions between poetic and political discourses and agendas? How can/should/do these literary strategies look like?

I think, often, these questions are answered by people who show a fundamental assurance I cannot relate to. I find most problems, most questions, confusing, and more complex than I can understand without serious consideration and time. Therefore the answers to these questions are way beyond me. That doesn’t mean I’m left inert in the face of very real challenges. In fact, by acknowledging my changing, confused perspective, a certain kind of pragmatism tends to come to the fore, and I am free to be active.

If I have to answer, and briefly, then I’d simply say there are interactions and disputes between politics and people, politics and culture, politics and language. Poetry is a tiny, all but irrelevant part of these interactions and disputes. Poetry has no more claim or power over these discourses than baking or gardening. People who write poems can be powerfully influential on politics and culture and people, but not exclusively because they write poems. There is nothing innately useful in poetry for positive change in political terms, apart from maybe a sensitivity to language (which might manipulate us), but you need not be a poet for that.

My opinion then, following from this, is that a strategy for change with literature is about people over poetry, process over product, context over content. That’s why I think organising collaborations with poets from all over the world, organising readings and projects – this is a political act that actually is inclusive and positive and makes changes. Others talk of being political with poetry, being liberal, with an ethics based on empathy, and then they isolate many humans who happen not to share their exact political opinion, and cause divisions and bitterness and fallout. So I’m interested in real space."

A note on: Kakania returns to London on March 31st 2016

Kakania in London – March 31st 2016: 7pm at Austrian Cultural Forum, London www.theenemiesproject.com/kakania2016

The Event: 7pm – Free Entry / The Symposium: 2pm – Free Entry / 28 Rutland Gate, London SW7 1PQ www.acflondon.org

The Kakania project returns to the Austrian Cultural Forum for a night of brand new performances, each from a contemporary artist or writer responding to a figure of Habsburg Era Vienna. The great, groundbreaking personas of 100 years past are made new by some of the most dynamic and innovative performers and thinkers of our day, without nostalgia, but with faithful invention and intensity. Visit www.kakania.co.uk for more information on the project.

Featuring Harry Man on Erwin Schrodinger  ~ Daniela Cascella on Hugo von Hofmannstahl ~ Steve Beresford on Arnold Schoenberg ~ Thomas Havlik on Walter Serner ~ SJ Fowler on Robert Musil ~ Declan Ryan on ...

The Kakania Symposium - March 31st at ACF London
2pm, 3pm, 4pm in 3 sessions www.theenemiesproject.com/kakaniasymposium

Address: 28 Rutland Gate, London SW7 1PQ. Phone020 7225 730 http://www.acflondon.org/

Preceding the evening’s performances there will be a symposium on Habsburg Vienna, through the kaleidoscope of Kakania’s inventive approach, led and curated by Dr.Diane Silverthorne, a leading voice in Habsburg Viennese studies. The Symposium will feature informal and academic talks about the era, interspersed with poetry and text art readings from poets and writers involved in the first year of the Kakania project, who will also give context to their process. The Symposium will also see a screening of the acclaimed film Altenberg: The Little Pocket Mirror. The schedule is thus: 

2pm - A talk by Dr. Diane Silverthorne on expressionist  landscapes in music and art and  talk by Dr. Leslie Topp, on madness, architecture and Vienna.

3pm - A talk by Jamie Ruers on Cabaret Fledermaus / A talk and reading by Eley Williams on Broncia Koller-Pinel / A talk and reading by Vicky Sparrow on Margarethe Wittgenstein / A talk by Stephen Emmerson on his multi-part performance art response on Rainer Maria Rilke. / A talk by Marcus Slease on writing a new poetry commission on Max Kurzweil. / A screening of Joshua Alexander’s experimental film on Paul Wittgenstein, commissioned for Kakania

4pm - A screening of ALTENBERG: The Little Pocket Mirror  A documentary by David Bickerstaff and Gemma Blackshaw  | 54 min

About Kakania

Following a brilliant first year in which 40 artists made 40 new commissions, 5 events in 5 venues took place in London and 2 original books was launched, Kakania returns with events in Berlin and London. The project is thoroughly documented here: www.kakania.co.uk and the project is only possible through the generosity of the Austrian Cultural Forum London.

Upcoming: Nemici - Italian Enemies on November 7th at the Rich Mix

Really excited for Nemici, an Italian Enemies project, taking place November saturday 7th at the Rich Mix Arts Centre. It's one the most ambitious international Enemies projects we've done, with 24 poets in 12 pairs. I'll be collaborating with the amazing Alessandro Burbank, the Burby of Venetian fame, and all the collaborations will be intense and dynamic, so many crossing mediums as well as language, covering performance art and video especially. Poets and artists have travelled from all over Europe for this, should be magic. www.theenemiesproject.com/nemici

Performing at Cafe Oto: July 20th for Daniela Cascella's FMRL

Really pleased and privileged to be part of this grand lineup of artists responding to Daniela Cascella's amazing book https://www.cafeoto.co.uk/events/day/2015/07/20/

DANIELA CASCELLA – ‘F.M.R.L. FOOTNOTES, MIRAGES, REFRAINS AND LEFTOVERS OF WRITING SOUND’ BOOK LAUNCH - £4 £3.30 (WEGOTTICKETS)
Book launch event for ‘F.M.R.L. Footnotes, Mirages, Refrains and Leftovers of Writing Sound’ by Daniela Cascella (Zer0 Books). With Christian Patracchini, Colin Potter, David Toop, Elaine Mitchener, Georgia Rodger, James Wilkes, Patrick Farmer + Trevor Simmons , Richard Skinner, Rie Nakajima, Salomé Voegelin, Steven J Fowler.

For her book launch Daniela Cascella has asked artists, writers, performers, musicians to remix, rewrite, re-read the book: to use the book as raw material and to present a series of short responses in any form or medium. This event is the fourth and last in the reFMRL series, that challenges the conventional format of the book launch to work instead with the book as material presence, and to enhance the polyphonies that inhabit and form F.M.R.L. https://enabime.wordpress.com/2015/05/08/refmrl-curating-conversing-drifting/

Listening into writing, reading into writing take shape in F.M.R.L. through a collection of short texts, fragments and deranged essays, with attention to pacing and linguistic derives. An archive of books, notebooks, events and records prompts the texts in these pages, responding to encounters with Michel Leiris’s autobiographical fictions; concerts and events at Café Oto and the Swedenborg House in London; visits to museums such as the Pitt Rivers in Oxford and exhibitions such as Ice Age Art at the British Museum, among the others.

F.M.R.L. is a book constructed across sonic patterns, assonance, repetitions, comprising texts that intermittently drift from sense to sound and to nonsense and back. A flip from the immateriality of sound to the sounds of letters and words as material, a call from reading to voicing. www.zero-books.net/books/f-m-r-l

This event is produced in collaboration with SARU, Sonic Art Research Unit, Oxford Brookes University. http://www.sonicartresearch.co.uk

Mahu - Opening Night - In Sound

Thanks to Daniela Cascella, Sharon Gal & all the readers. A beautiful way to open the exhibition, and so many discoveries.