Subscribe by Email

Transcapes / The Halted Traveler

Part of the exhibition Other Indications at the Municipal Arts Centre in Nicosia (NiMAC), 'Transcapes / The Halted Traveler' is a project co-curated by artist Maria Loizidou and researcher/curator/journalist Elena Parpa - within Parpa's larger proposal 'Exercises on Orientation' - which takes the form of a workshop of "memory recall". It makes use of work by a group of artists, architects and poets (Meletis Apostolides, Leto Kattou with Leontios Toumpouris, Marianna Christofides, Kyrillos Sarris with Giorgos Hatzimichalis, Yves Sabourin, and myself) to "approach the concept of landscape as a mnemonic and psychographic space, which is composed through personal narratives, memory overlapping, but also through travels – real and imaginary – which at times activate the desire for repositioning in space and time [... and] attempts to create the conditions for such a reorientation."

To realise 'Transcapes / The Halted Traveler', Loizidou worked with the contributors towards creating a 'carnet' (notebook) with work from each. The notebooks, though identical on the outside, contain individual and specific treatments of the question of urban landscape and memory. In my case this takes the form of having a copy of my book Muses Walk embedded into the notebook, encompassed by fragments from older posts on this blog concerning themselves with the process of the book's conception, composition and production. This material is intended to provide take-off points for discussions & workshops on the themes under consideration. The project also includes some complementary material, such as an additional notebook with a bibliography suggested by the participating artists, and a number of films, including a 5-minute 'home video' in which I read from Muses Walk, shown on a loop.

This ambitious exhibition - "with an aim of renegotiating and re-examining the procedures of curating art exhibitions" and "an experimental approach to curatorial practices" - in which I'm delighted to have been invited to take part, also marks the 20th anniversary of the centre. It opens this coming Saturday 30 November 2013 and runs until 30 March 2014.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Almost Unpoetic": a review of my books

Sabne Raznik, a poet, book reviewer and freelance writer based in Kentucky in the US, has posted a review of my three books on Yahoo! Voices under the heading 'The Work of Christodoulos Makris' . It's a generally positive response to them, particularly to  Muses Walk ("With it, one begins to see that Makris is an important poet, not just for sleepy Ireland, but perhaps for the world," she writes) but not without expressing some reservations along the way. I must note a couple of factual inaccuracies: the project for which Muses Walk was originally conceived and made is an international one, called 'An Inventory of Al-Mutanabbi Street'; and,   much as I wish it were true, there has been no recent trip to Greece .
Read more

DIAL on Dublin Digital Radio

Tune in to Dublin Digital Radio  on Saturday 7 December 2024 at 2pm local time, where I will be performing excepts from my writing project DIAL , with sonic interventions by Joanna Mattrey, Keith Lindsay and Nick Roth, in a 60 minute broadcast presented by Diatribe Records. DIAL is a durational-procedural-aleatory work I composed by live-transcribing 5 minutes of talk radio broadcasting anywhere in the world each and every day across the entire calendar year 2021, and linking these transcripts with short pieces of 'original' writing produced contemporaneously. The radio station accessed each day depended on the previous day's text, and was determined by entering keywords from it as search terms on the TuneIn platform. The full manuscript runs to over 120k words, and it is divided into 12 chapters arranged as uninterrupted blocks of text. Over the past few months I have been working with Diatribe Records in translating DIAL back into sound by speaking the entire te...
Read more

gorse editorial

I was honoured and delighted to receive an invitation from Susan Tomaselli to join gorse  as poetry editor - an invitation I wasted no time in accepting. As I'd written  elsewhere , I consider gorse a unique and refreshing presence in the Irish literary landscape, with an outlook, temperament and set of interests that resonate deeply with mine. Getting the chance to contribute to it in an editorial capacity and to work towards strengthening the considerable impact it has already made in just two issues is a hugely exciting challenge, full of possibilities. It's hard to specify what kind of poetry I'm looking for, because above all I want to publish poetry I didn't know I was looking for. Likely to interest me, though, is writing that plays with boundaries of form, language and genre, that's aware of social, political, technological and cultural developments, that's interrogative and outward-looking, conceptually-rigorous and witty. We are beginning to work ...
Read more