Texts
Hatching New Audiences? Wayne Burrows
http://www.incwriters.co.uk
On Tuesday night, between 7pm and midnight, the sixth Hatch programme, Hatch: Across, cranked into gear on Nottingham’s St James’s Street, taking in a range of performers from the relatively well-known likes of Leicester’s Metro-Boulot Dodo and Bristol’s Action Hero to local artists and students just trying things out, taking risks, and coming up with ideas as oddly compelling as Ruth Scott’s three hour tightrope walk in an Australian-themed bar, Adam Goodge’s philosophical snooker sessions, and an attempt by Ollie Smith to describe the lobby of the Park Plaza Hotel in instant text messages to Kathryn Cooper, who then tried to draw it during a live online link up between Nottingham and Barcelona.
Although billed as a performance event, the Hatch nights are the brainchild of two writers – Nathaniel J. Miller and Michael Pinchbeck - who came up with the idea as a way of bringing together a whole community of people to collaborate, experiment and generally catalyse new work in and around their home city. Of the six events staged in the two years since, only a couple have received any significant funding, and the Hatch model demonstrates what a collaborative approach can achieve in terms of bringing artists and appreciative audiences together.
Hatch has the feel of a free street party or unique never-to-be-repeated event, each one based on a new theme and quite unlike the last: in that – and its open door policy to participants and observers alike – lies the secret of its success. Individual pieces you might see along the way can be wonderful, heroically misguided or simply the beginnings of something that will develop further, but whatever the mix of parts, it’s the whole package of Hatch that gives these sessions their buzz, and brings audiences back (with their friends) time and again.
Perhaps it’s a format that would be hard to translate directly to writing and publishing, but it’s worth noting that many Hatch events are essentially text-based, with staged fake powerpoint lectures, one-on-one performances in which someone might whisper their script into your ear under a duvet, and absurdist puppet shows all part of the mix. Perhaps more poets and short story writers should be devising similarly inventive ways of presenting material and taking a greater part than is currently evident in events like Hatch, and others like it elsewhere in the UK.
Some, of course, are already doing exactly this: David Gaffney’s fiction has been presented in many different ways, as has the work of Ken Hollings, while even the mainstream has Iain Sinclair’s activities in psychogeographic walking, film-making and theatrical presentation. Perhaps the running so far has been made more by such inventive but niche publishing enterprises as Mark Pilkington’s Strange Attractor or Phoebe Blatton and Susan Finlay’s wonderfully low-budget Coelacanth Press than the typical poetry and fiction presses, though it’s hugely encouraging to see Popshot Magazine and others like it developing the 60s heritage of magazines like Ambit.
Performance poetry has long been noted for its inventive ways of framing work outside the usual confines of the traditional bookshop and author reading, but examples of this approach in page-based work also seem to be on the rise. If anyone reading knows of interesting approaches to add to the (very partial) list above, please post them, as I’d love to hear more.
I’d go so far as to wonder if the future of writing rests on nurturing this kind of activity alongside our traditional outlets, and just as the galleries, theatres, art cinemas and festival circuits ultimately benefit from the fresh interest generated by the activities of nights like Hatch, similar things in literature probably wouldn’t do our magazine and book sales any harm either.
1.04.2010_07.05.2010 lun_sab 11.00_13.00 15.00_19.00
CUL DE SAC
artisti / artists EMANUELE BECHERI, GIOVANNI OBERTI, ALEXANDROS PAPATHANASIOU, RUTH SCOTT
a cura di / curated by ALESSANDRO SARRI
Cul de sac, hinderance, dead end, forbiddance, danger, vulnus, interdiction, removal, undertow, obscenity. Cul de sac tries to figure out what remains of something that, due to a finalization, tends to hide and forget its unthinkable process of construction that keeps on erasing just in the moment it comes about, exausting right in the secret of its own inscription in which singularity annihilates universality. Cul de sac intended here as the thing that even the process itself forgets and removes right away, in order to re-born as escatology. Cul de sac as something new stuck in the reiteration of a reproposition intended here as identical act, simultaneously what has arrived and what’s still here, present in what has already been ruined by its presence célibataire. Cul de sac looks like an undecided nucleus of formalization that pushes and insists both in every arrival and in every origin; an indirect image, here and now but nevertheless irreparably gone because of the impossibility of any removal, because of its irrecoverable inamovibility. This gap without gap cannot be summarized in a simple presence or in a simple absence, in some kind of an acceptance or transgression but it takes place and develops in the blind spot in which formalization will never be able to formalize itself. A formalization that can be ingenerated just in the occurrence in which the wholeness of being of its absence will totally coincide with the wholeness of being of its presence. Four young artists will try to face this impracticable answer through the impossibile redefinition of a practise that sets in the murmuring of a cross–check form that articulates endlessly the leitmotiv of its impasse, the echolalia of a plastic defeat that cannot be interpreted, without expression, since everything passes from an inside to another inside. Installation and video will create something that could be definied the reverse of the matrix, in other words, the irrecoverable excess that drives the work into the orphan conjugation of an origin without any beginning; the apocryphal advance of a virgin residue that will never be a simple residue, but instead, through Maurice Blanchot, a residue that will have been present in spite of its presence and will have been absent in spite of its absence.
MARK WAUGH
DIRECTOR OF A FOUNDATION
LIVERPOOL
CHATEAU DE SACY RESIDENCY
AUGUST 2009
Before she arrived at Chateau de Sacy Ruth Scott had been involved in a series of works that explored the relationship between the artist and the spaces they inhabit, using various media, including video and sound installations, to test the temporal and ephemeral energy of artists working in the idiom of performance. Artists such as Vito Acconci (performance artist of the 1960’s and 70’s) were an inspiration for early works in which the artists’ physical self became both image and medium. For example, Box Performance 2006 asks when does a tent become a canvas? Let us imagine we are in a tent as the sun goes down. We are writing on the wall of our canvas enclosure as the chromatic texture of the world changes. Light is over- written by darkness. This inscription on the soft surface of our habitation signals our presence. The words are surfaced and reside in our absence - our marks are not merely hieroglyphs to be deciphered, they are raw marks, sparks of the primal energy from this animal that creates shelter and tools for being in space. Our tent is both a space for projection and protection, a space for imaginary nights under the stars. Scott’s lines are never figurative but evocative of nomadic ideas that refuse to settle down. Our only defense is to draw borders quickly to repel this infinity, pulling ink across velum, biro on a pencil case, charcoal on a cave wall deep underground. It is the trace itself, the supplement of consciousness, the mirror to becoming human, light across the darkness of night. During the residency she has defined her trajectory as a continuation of this abstract but physical mediation of her body through space. The artist will return to the supplement of drawing to explore‘how our bodies can be mapped out by tracing their movements and recording their absence.’
Mark Waugh Director of A Foundation, Liverpool.