Subscribe by Email

Phonica Season on Hotel Magazine

I recently had the opportunity to programme a season of mixed media publications for Hotel magazine (London) expanding on selected performances from across our nine Phonica events (Dublin, January 2016 - November 2018). These publications appeared at regular intervals between April and August 2021, and the season is now complete.

Phonica is a Dublin-based performance series rooted in Word and Sound, with an emphasis on multiformity and the experimental. Directed, programmed and hosted by myself and Olesya Zdorovetska, Phonica aims to explore compositional and performative ideas and to encourage a melting pot of audiences and artists from across artforms and borders. It has been in receipt of financial and operational support from the Arts Council of Ireland, Dublin City Council, Poetry Ireland and Smock Alley Theatre, as well as a range of international partners. The full Phonica history is documented here.

After nine iterations, activities were interrupted due to a number of factors, notably the onset of Covid-19. Invited earlier this year by Hotel editor Dominic Jaeckle to put together a Phonica archive to inaugurate a 'Seasons' strand for the online extension of the magazine, I took the opportunity to curate a reflection on the procedural, improvisational, event-specific and provisional aspects of the series, with particular relation to some of the language-based performances and presentations.

For this season, then, a selection of writers and artists contribute texts and/or audiovisual material presented, connected to, derived from, or developed out of their performances at Phonica, along with contextualising notes. Click on the titles below for links to each individual entry, or here for the Season's main page:

Suzanne Walsh: 'Precipice of an End'
Roy Claire Potter: 'Carrer Dels Escudellers'
Robert Herbert McClean: 'No Apocalypse Poetry Slam'
Alice Lyons & Justyn Hunia: 'Rosehip Syrup'

With thanks to Dominic Jaeckle for the proposal and invitation, and for offering us the space on Hotel to experiment with the archive. My thanks also to all contributors for their generosity and their extended partnership with Phonica.


  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ISLA Festival 2014

Organised and presented by Instituto Cervantes in Dublin, ISLA is a festival of literature now in its third year that focuses on writers from or with links to Ireland, Spain and Latin America. This year the programme of events runs over three days, between 17 and 19 October, and features 21 authors (including John Banville, Claire Keegan and Hugo Hamilton) engaging in a range of discussions and readings. There are also screenings of documentaries on Gabriel García Marquez and Octavio Paz. I'm participating in a reading & discussion with title 'Building Identities' taking place on the fist day of the festival, Friday 17 October - also featuring Donal Ryan and Anamaría Crowe Serrano and chaired by Philip Johnston of University College Dublin (UCD). We start at 6.15pm. The venue for all events is the Institute's Café Literario at Lincoln House, Lincoln Place, Dublin 2. Admission is free - but due to limited capacity the Institute encourages those interested to book
Read more

Herbarium

Herbarium is an anthology of poems, edited by James Wilkes , celebrating and exploring the contemporary resonances of medicinal plants and herbs. It features contributions from over 50 poets and is published in celebration of the Urban Physic Garden , a pop-up community-built garden of medicinal plants installed in Southwark this summer by Wayward Plants - a collective of architects, designers, artists and urban growers - with the aim of blooming a slice of neglected London land for a short period. The garden is open to visitors Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 6pm, until 15 August 2011. For the anthology, each species in the garden was selected by a participating poet, who then produced a poem around it. My contribution ('Sincerely') relates to the herb gravelroot. Gravelroot is a "white- and purple-flowered plant up to 3m/10ft; North American Indian red dye plant" ( The Complete Book of Herbs , Clevely and Richmond, Lorenz Books, 1994). Its roots and seedheads
Read more

Stone and Sea - Pafos2017 European Capital of Culture

On Monday 9 October I'll be reading at the opening of the poetry & photography exhibition  Stone and Sea  in Pafos Municipal Gallery. Part of the Pafos2017 European Capital of Culture programme, Stone and Sea is "a poetic meeting and a photographic exhibition by Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot photographers, that have the stone and the sea as their points of reference; elements that are inextricably linked with the fate of Cypriot people and of crucial importance for the shaping of their temperament. The project combines a walk through rocks deeply rooted in the soil, statues and pebbles of the coastline, with the reflective gazing of the sea, which is anticipated as an uncorrupted cultural value, a place of eutopia open to diversity." Readings by several invited poets with links to Cyprus will be accompanied by a trilingual presentation of the poems - in Greek, Turkish and English. I'm delighted that as part of this my poem 'Full Circle' from The A
Read more