Nemici: Italian Enemies in London - November 2015
November 7th 2015: 24 poets & artists in 12 pairs: celebrating contemporary Italian poetry in collaboration
All the videos available here: http://www.theenemiesproject.com/nemici
An ambitious celebration of contemporary Italian & British poetry and art in London, the Nemici project brought together Italian poets from all over Italy and all over Europe, to work in collaboration, as pairs, with a series of British poets.
I first met Alessandro Burbank in Venice, and did so under the auspice of his old world hospitality. To the restaurants without tourists, like me, to readings where Venetians made up the audiences. A man so Venetian precisely because others, because of his surname, that of an American father, marked him out as not quite Venetian. But if ever I’ve met a man who allowed me to rediscover, to understand for the first time, a city, it is Alessandro. And meeting him, through the Incroci di Voci project, curated by James Wilkes and Alessandro Mistrorigo, through chance operation and not a decided search is the way in which I met almost all the Italians involved in the Nemici project. All 12 of them, through readings, events, friends of friends. The plethora, the size of Italian poets, artists and writers doing interesting things across Europe, made itself known to me, and demanded an event to celebrate such intensity and variance. So the event itself proved, huge somehow, intensive, generous, hospitable, energetic. Over 100 people packed into the upper floors of the Rich Mix to witness 12 new collaborations from Italians and British based poets and artists, covering everything from performance, to video, to lyrical poetry and translation, to theatre. It was an event which almost precisely evidenced the reasons for Enemies, for its format – that collaboration pulls down singularity and subjectivity, makes people kinder, makes a community, that by celebrating a nation across nations in this way, nationalism dissipates and individuals true idiosyncracies and creativity comes to the fore, in structure as well as content. That people want to enjoy readings as events, as artworks, that they need to be curated as an exhibition would be, and that those involved should be asked on their attitude to the world as well as their work. The generous create waves of generosity through their work, and people leave feeling something special, but powerfully transient, has occurred. And that’s what happened on November 7th 2015, at the top of Brick Lane, where Alessandro and I took hold of the camera, translated each other through jargon and noise and I got to yell at him ‘you are a roman god’ with half-irony.
'CROSSING VOICES / INCROCI DI VOCI' - Venice: May 2014
Crossing Voices / Incroci di voci was an extraordinary collaborative poetry workshop and performance project at Ca Foscari, University of Venice from May 2nd to May 7th 2014, with poets Alessandro Burbank, Andrea Leonessa, Ariadne Radi Cor, Emma Bennett and curated by James Wilkes and Alessandro Mistrorigo. Working on 6 brand new pieces, each led by one of the 6 participants, utilising poetry through concepts of voice, sound, technology and performance. http://crossingvoices.weebly.com/
The collective project directed by SJ Fowler at Crossing Voices explores the vocality of the other artists involved working with atonality and harmony. The protagonists arrange themselves in a circle, as in a chorus, sharing an experience of simultaneously producing vocal sound and listening theirs voices. This sound exercise deeps its roots in popular songs. SJ Fowler is a poet, artist, martial artist & vanguardist. He works in the modernist and avant-garde traditions, across poetry, fiction, sonic art, visual art, installation and performance. He has published five books and been commissioned by the Tate, Mercy, Penned in the Margins and the London Sinfonietta. He has been translated into 13 languages and has performed in venues across the world, from Mexico to Iraq. He is the poetry editor of “3am magazine” and is the curator of the Enemies project. | SJ Fowler è un poeta, artista, artista marziale e avanguardia. Lavora all’interno della tradizione modernista e d'avanguardia, attraverso poesia, narrativa, arte sonora e visiva, installazioni e performance. Ha pubblicato cinque libri e ha ricevuto commissioni da Tate, Mercy, Penned in the Margins e la London Sinfonietta. È stato tradotto in 13 lingue e si è esibito in tutto il mondo, dal Messico all’Iraq. È redattore della rivista di poesia “3am magazine” ed è il curatore di Enemies project. http://www.sjfowlerpoetry.com
Emma Bennett presents a collective work that primarily involves listening and imitation based on the production of sound through human vocal apparatus. Helped by the other artists, she works directly with and on the voice putting language under pressure and highlighting errors of execution as well as the slipping movement from language to non-language and vice versa. Emma Bennett is a performer, writer and artist. Her vocal scores, sound poems and mixed media works have been performed at venues across the UK, including Arnolfini in Bristol, the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh and the Wigmore Hall in London, and also broadcast by BBC Radio 3. She is currently working at the Drama Department at Queen Mary University of London on “Verbal Slapstick” exploring the comedic interplay between voice, body and poetic figure. She lives in London. http://www.emma-bennett.co.uk/
Alessandro Burbank is attracted by the chaos of mass communication media and how this strange mix of inputs can feed his poetic language. In his performative work, which recall the ancient rhapsodic chant accompanied by a sort of greek chorus in English, Burbank will read his text hampered by technology (via Skype) while on the screen will appear simultaneously other windows with video, music, etc. All this will make clear the difficulty of understanding the poetic message. Alessandro Burbank, poet and performer as well as an animator of the Venetian poetic scene, has participated to various poetry festivals by attending national Poetry Slam in Bologna, Turin, Milan, Treviso, Venice, Trento, getting several podiums. He collaborates with various musicians and with the association MAIA NGO, which deals with cooperation in Palestine, has collected poems, experiences, videos and photos of young Palestinian poets. For him reading in public has to do with engagement in civil life: a gesture to bring back the figure of the poet in the community. https://ilburbank.wordpress.com/
James Wilkes' work involved all the other artists in the production of "cyanotypes", which are prints obtained through exposure of chemically treated paper to sunlight. These "cyanotypes" (projected on the screen) were regarded as actual scores for voice and used in the performance at Crossing Voices final event. James Wilkes is a poet and writer who has collaborated widely with scientists, artists and musicians to investigate topics such as brain imaging, radio and landscape. In 2012-13 he was poet-in-residence at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in London. http://www.renscombepress.co.uk/
Ariadne Radi Cor's explores collection and reuse of fragments of text, images, video and sound. In this case, the starting point has been a poem titled "Remember, comma, this brightness" which is about fluidity of separation and departures. This poem is itself a collage of excerpts from the last six months of Ariadne's diaries. The sights and sounds, which are also fragments of memory, were collected during the workshop. James Wilkes has also collaborated in modifying Ariadne's text during the workshop at Crossing Voices. Ariadne Radi Cor studied philosophy at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. Currently she lives and works in London, where she is studying English Literature. Writer, collector of teaspoons, she loves metaphors and postcards. Her artistic work if developed through varies modalities: collage, poetry, letters, photographs, video, walls, and noises. http://www.ariadneradicor.com
Crossing Voices - a Venice diary
Crossing Voices is the kind of project I will always want to be a part of. A project that was so resonant to experience, it’s ruined others by comparison and informed me massively on how I want to develop my own stuff. I got to spend nearly a week in Venice, learning from and sharing with 5 brilliant poets, a remarkable curator, working toward genuinely innovative work, in the shadow of a Venetian venice, well away from the Disneyland city I had experienced before. Just a privilege from the first moment to the last. http://crossingvoices.weebly.com/
Crossing Voices is the child of Alessandro Mistrorigo, who is part of the faculty at the University in Venice, and who had connected with James Wilkes in the UK, and being part of the collective Mopha with Jamie, and Emma Bennett, who also attended, I found myself invited to be part of the program. The format had six of us, three Brits and three Italians, spending three days together in the Cultural Flow Zone (!) workplace connected to the library of the University, which was pretty much on the water in Venice, developing six brand new pieces of collaborative work, each led by one of us, and involving the other five of us. These six pieces would be performed back to back at a night in the University.
To make this work was an extraordinary achievement on Alessandro’s part, to choose the right people, to make sure the context of their experience together was conducive to the work, to emphasise the process and shape the direction. It was an amazingly energising experience to be part of, the works were so exploratory and there really was the space to workshop things, take things into new directions, and all of us were together in risking that. Such a rare thing, to have the time and space to really collaborate. The Italian poets were all young, humble, eccentric and authentic – Alessandro Burbank, a gentle bear like presence who would descend on the group as quickly as he would disappear, a true Venetian, who mediated the city for us. Andrea Leonessa, immensely open, intense, technologically considered and genuinely innovative. Ariadne Radi Cor – a poet, but also a live writer, a penwoman, a gentle, visual presence.
We arrived straight into a reading in a gallery on Guidecca, or Judgment Island, getting a full whack of the really interesting local poets, who read with video or music accompaniment, and seemed really open to the more conceptual, avant garde work we were presenting. Emma did a beautiful birdsong performance, and Jamie, his wonderful delayed feedback strokeout work. I did some new performative stuff from Fights, I thought it was a bit naff in the end, punching the air, stuttering, but I wanted to try it. We were introduced to each other through this reading, the group was exposed to each other before we would spend three days in close quarters, in a room, having to trust each other, push each other, before a looming performative deadline.
The first day we shared the concepts we had prepared before the meeting, ideas that were reasoned but not fully formed, and the complimentary nature of the directions we wanted to go in was immediately apparent. I wanted to use the project to try something to do with song, with choral multivocal techniques that use multiplicity to mediate atonality, something Im interested in because I cant sing. I used a lot of musical references to introduce, sacred harp singing, Calabrian fishing work songs, Swans. Emma developed a piece based on repetition, and unfamiliar languages, that evolved live into a brilliant Chinese whispers circle, where we would race around our hexagon, mauling words and phrases as they passed from mouth to mouth. James had brought some amazing visual materials, acetate and inks, and gave us the chance to create collaboration asemic and calligraphic works. These were developed and then read as scores by us in pairs, Cobbing esque, reading abstraction as noise. Andrea designed a program that read his voice, awkwardly, and read into his computer while playing a flight simulator, leaving James, Emma and I to live interpret the bastardised text that would scroll out after he spoke. Ariadne used his full range of skills to actually shoot and edit a beautiful short film over the 3 days, and Alessandro created a really complex psychogeographical live skype performance with Greek chorus accompaniment, half translations, security camera streaming and live google searches. Hard to explain.
The works developed over hours and hours, but over our breakfasts and our evening meals as much as in the workshop. We were treated to local treatment, masses of seafood, black spaghetti, long walks through the city, live translations, Venetian wit and hospitality. The entirety of the experience was genuinely absorbing, and for me, a week back from an equally overwhelming experience in Iraq, in which time I contracted norovirus and was in fever blindness, I felt like everything was somehow more immediate for feeling so ethereal. Venice has that about it, when you can get it without feeling utterly outside. The company of the people made it, channelled so carefully by the gentility and intelligence of James and Alessandro.
I loved the experience of the performance itself, really rare to feel collaboration as truly collective. The audience seemed to feel that, that they were invited to become a further extension of what had become a miniature, fleeting community of artists. The war of it brought us into friendships too, having to balance so many elements creatively and performatively, and to step outside of our normal zones. The final night, like the others, was spent around a food filled table, talking, until late, until we got the boat home. Sad to leave it behind, but I am sure it won’t be the last note of a remarkable thing. I’m very lucky I was a small part of it.
I am really honoured to now have a profile up on the Phonodia project, curated by the amazing Alessandro Mistrorigo and housed at the University of Venice.
http://phonodia.unive.it/people/sj-fowler/
This brilliant project brings together a wide array of poets from around the world with beautifully rendered sound recordings of them reading their works alongside the texts.
You can see from the site just how many really great poets are featured, and I got to do these recordings when visiting Venice for the Crossing Voices project earlier in the year. Another wonderful by product of that amazing project, if you click on my profile, you can hear a variety of my work from across from different books.
the last of the five collaborations published as part of my feature for Cordite magazine, this work with Ariadne Radi Cor came about from our time together in Venice as part of the Crossing Voices project. She is an incredible artist and filmmaker - a live writer, a calligrapher, a poet. Her speed and tone are very complimentary to my own in their difference and singularity. Im so glad our creative relationship has continued on into this year, and this work, to be published in its full form for an anthology about Crossing Voices is a true collaboration, with a suite of my poems written for the task having been rendered beautiful by Ari's talents. http://cordite.org.au/poetry/collaboration/la-dominate/