On libraries: introduction

No abstract available

The walking library: mobilising books, places, readers and reading

The Walking Library, inaugurated in 2012, has functioned as a mobile laboratory and art project for the ongoing exploration of the relationships between environments, books, reading and writing. In this essay, our focus turns to The Walking Library’s function as a library, asking: ‘What sort of library is a walking library? What does a walking library do—for its books and its borrowers and the places through which it moves? And what can it reveal or teach us about libraries, books, reading and environment?’ In a context in which data has become ‘mobile’, we explore the mobility of physical books through the Walking Library’s social and architextural designs and structures. The book on the move is recognised as the material of social bonding. The Walking Library depends upon and promotes the mobility of books through social networks by gifting, lending, borrowing and sharing; it is the social capacity—the social capital—of The Walking Library, and of walking and reading together, which concerns us most here. The Walking Library has offered temporary spaces for sociality, for shared contemplation, poetic spatiality and kinaesthetic comprehension. In doing so, it has generated a heightened sense of books’ sociability, spatiality and mobility through a stronger understanding of the inter-dependencies of reading, walking, time and place

Stories from the walking library

From August 17 to September 17, 2012, Deirdre Heddon and Misha Myers created and carried a Walking Library, made for the Sideways Arts Festival. Sideways, a festival ‘in the open' and 'on the go', aimed to connect ecology and culture through using the 'slow ways' or ‘slow paths’ of Flanders. The Walking Library was comprised of more than 90 books suggested as books ‘good to take for a walk’ and functioned as a mobile library for Sideways’ artists and public participants. In addition to carrying a curated stock, the Library offered a peripatetic reading and writing group. Drawing on the Library’s resources and the experience of reading, writing and walking one’s way across Belgium, Heddon and Myers consider how reading in situ affects the experience of the journey and the experience of walking; how journeying affects the experience of reading; how reading affects the experience of writing; and how a walk, as a space of knowledge production, is written and read

HOMING PLACE: TOWARDS A PARTICIPATORY, AMBULANT AND CONVERSIVE METHODOLOGY

The practice-as-research project Homing Place proposes a transferable percipient-led methodology of performance and research activated by ambulant and conversive mechanisms as the culmination of this research. The thesis is comprised of a range of activity that represents a moment and way of writing practice. Three artworks that comprise part of the practical component of this thesis--- way from home, Take me to a place and Yodel Rodeo-- each involved participation and contribution from particular audiences and social groups in spatial and conversational modes of performance executed through processes of wayfinding, mapping and walking. One of the primary contributions of knowledge of this research is the notion of homing tales and the knowledge derived from its deployment as a re-working of nostalgia and as a radical spatial narrative practice of home-making and orientation in specific contexts of migration. Another central contribution is the identification of a particular form of conversational ambulant practice within contemporary performance as conversive wayfinding, an artistic spatial practice where the performance event occurs in the conversational activity set in motion by the conditions of wayfinding. Among the questions raised are: How do contextually-based and participant-led performance mechanisms enable opportunities for participants to express strategies of home-making and enable participants to articulate their own critical perspectives and experiences of place, particularly in the experience of migration? How do people construct narratives and practices of home and identity in the experience of cultural and historical displacement? How do people meet, sense and make meaningful sense of places in and through spatial narrative practices? How do these practices become radical strategies to critique, resist and enable power and to create emergent forms of identity and belonging

The walking library for women walking

No abstract available

Walking library for a wild city

‘The Walking Library’ is an ongoing practice-as-research project which explores the relationship between literature, environment and walking through a site-specific and peripatetic form of reading as performance. First commissioned in 2012 for the Sideways Festival of walking art (Belgium), the project has generated a number of subsequent commissioned events each original in conception and findings, including "The Walking Library for Women Walking” (2016) and “The Walking Library for a Wild City" (2018), the latter documented in the Artist Pages of this issue. The project asks how reading while walking through the landscape with others activates both the environment as well as the sociable, mobile and spatial endowments of the book that make it such a pliable media for the possibility of journeys and stories and places to converge. For each subsequent event this question is re-framed in response to the specific context of the new work and for the audiences who participate. Their responses are gathered through their suggestions for books, selections of readings and written experiences on the walks. ‘The Walking Library for a Wild City’ was commissioned as part of a collaboration with artist Alec Finlay by Glasgow Life/European Championship Festival Glasgow 2018 and involved a programme of eight walks across Glasgow, an exhibition at The Hidden Gardens and publication of a book documenting the walks. This edition of “The Walking Library” seeks to explore the natural environment in urban settings through reading together while walking. https://walkinglibraryproject.wordpress.com/

On Care-fulness: Critical Creative Expressions of Care in a Feminist Theatre Research Project

In early 2020, as the first of many COVID lockdowns began across Australia, a collective of feminist and queer performance scholars and artists embarked on the research project Staging Australian Women’s Lives: Theatre, Feminism and Socially Engaged Art. Our aim was to document contributions of womxn theatre makers, while conducting a feminist analysis of strategies used to deal with gender inequality and oppression, on stage and off. While pivoting to the digital and the virtual, we recognised a need to support womxn theatre makers whose lives and livelihoods are thrown into further precarity by the pandemic. This paper speaks to our commitment to bringing together critical theory, arts practices and everyday life in ethical forms and encounters that make visible, recognise and express care for one another and for the work

Now Everybody Sing: The voicing of dissensus in new choral performance

This peer-reviewed article in The Performance Research Journal, “On Participation and Synchronicity” defines an emergent form of contemporary choral performance that has not been considered elsewhere. It investigates examples of choral works (Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleine’s Complaints Choir, Phil Menton’s Feral Choir, Bill Drummond’s The 17), that push the boundaries of choral performance to offer new modes of collective and co-authored music making as contemporary live art and performance. These works offer opportunities for contemporary formations of community via self-replicating structures of collaboration, self-organisation, social interaction and dissensus. This research follows on from and contributes to my on-going exploration of participatory structures and modes of co-authorship and meaning-making in performance. It expands upon the exploration of aleatory, interactive or propositional structures enacted in my previous project way from home and Take me to a place, a song map of Plymouth created and performed with international inhabitants of the city in 2004 (www.soundcloud.com/homingplace). Following on from the publication, I curated two related symposiums, festivals of performances and series of workshops at the Performance Centre at Falmouth University in 2012 and 2013 with contributions and headline performances from Gaggle, Phil Minton and Bill Drummond