This Thursday 24th at 10am at Bethnal Green library, VerySmallKitchen presents the Art Writing Field Station as part of LECTURE HALL. FREE SCHOOL, a festival organised by Edward Dorrian/ Five Years Gallery and The Ladies of the Press. For a full programme of the event see here. 

ART WRITING FIELD STATION will include presentations by David Berridge, Marit Muenzberg, Tamarin Norwood, and Mary Paterson, along with live broadcast by Karen di Franco and the CONCRETE RADIO project. LECTURE HALL. FREE SCHOOL describes itself as follows:

Following from YES.YES. I KNOW. FREE SCHOOL. I KNOW (Five Years, 2009) and taking advantage of the free use of the Bethnal Green Library Lecture Hall, Five Years/ Ladies of the Press have called for a wide range of proposals, from fantastical performances to academic papers, to form a programme of events that respond to the idea of the Public Lecture, pedagogic experience and the open/ free educational initiative.

This was an open invitation for anyone to propose a participatory activity to be carried out as part of the programme. What constitutes a ‘Public Lecture’ was freely interpreted and defined by participants. Participation was free, and all events are open to the public. Each proposed lecture/ performance/ presentation/ paper should be contained within a two hour time slot.  

All proposals for the series are documented on the Five Years Gallery website. My own proposal for our session was as follows:

For LECTURE HALL. FREE SCHOOL the ART WRITING FIELD STATION present a series of investigations of the field of art writing as it intersects with the conceptual and practical situation of the THE LECTURE HALL.

Building on several previous events – including one for Five Years Gallery FIELD RECORDINGS programme in February – this FIELD STATION begins from a presentation of material (by David Berridge) on artists/ writers working in the field of talk, lecture, and conversation. The aim is to present a survey of a field of activity, highlighting its pedagogical possibilities, as well as how it intersects with different architectures of (a) lecture (b) seminar and (c) conversation. The form of this part of the session will explore this in relation to the Bethnal Green library space, and its pedagogical possibilities. 

This talk will be followed by three other presentations – by Marit Muenzberg, Tamarin Norwood and Mary Paterson – who have each been asked to consciously position themselves within this spectrum of conversation, lecture, and seminar, exploring the possibilities and permeability of each. This structure may determine the nature of the work itself, or it may be something to be considered when presenting work already developed in/ for other contexts. 

In all instances the intention is to explore the (Bethnal Green library) lecture hall as a place of exchange and communication and how that might effect our individual practices. Because these influences cannot be directly articulated I have asked presenters to consider how their work creates a “poetical zone of thought construction” (Harald Szeemann’s phrase for Kurt Schwitters Merzbau).

As well as individual presentations I am interested in a “live writing” that responds to the whole event. For LECTURE  HALL. FREE SCHOOL this will be a live FM broadcast by Karen Di Franco’s  CONCRETE RADIO project – a highly localised radio station that, during the event, will both transmit presentations/ discussions and introduce its own material into the field station. 

Art Writing Field Station, Leeds, 27Mar 2010. Photo: Simon Zimmerman/ Writing Encounters

Some notes by the authors on some of the individual presentations:

TAMARIN NORWOOD: Tamarin Norwood develops a set of proposals for the present relevance of past performance, considering the scope of conversational implicature in lecture writing and performance writing.

MARIT MUENZBERG: An exploration of various connections between different spaces and their temporalities performed in, on and around the dummy book.

MARY PATERSON: A presentation which lies between a talk, a discussion and a confessional.  The focus is memory and the model is Memory Exchange, a project conceived for Writers’ Tent at  Away Day (May 2010). How do memories create the future?  When does fiction become imaginary?  What do you remember?

And this from Karen Di Franco on the CONCRETE RADIO project that will broadcast live throughout the event: 

Concrete Radio is an itinerant project that attempts to describe the relationship between producer and originator, by exploring the liminal space of transmitting and receiving. Broadcasting within a highly localised area, Concrete Radio occupies a large space within a short distance, transmitting a programme of found fragments, historical recordings and audio performances.

For the Lecture Hall I intend to set up a situation where I am simultaneously receiving and transmitting broadcast material produced by the Art Writing Field Station with additional contextual content produced by Concrete Radio. This broadcast will then be transmitted and received on radios placed in specific areas of the building – visitors are also invited to bring their own. Frequency details will be published on the day.

Karen di Franco, A Ritual for Concrete Radio, at The Barber Shop, R. Rosa Araújo 5 Lisboa, Portugal, 29 April 2010.

This if the fourth ART WRITING FIELD STATION following on from events in London (Five Years Gallery and Sara Lane Studios) and Leeds (Project Space Leeds). 

A full range of information, announcements and reports on the events can be seen here, whilst ART WRITING FIELD STATION chapbooks by Rachel Lois Clapham, Tamarin Norwood, and Mary Paterson can be read here.  For more information contact David Berridge at verysmallkitchen@gmail.com