A note on : South of the River conference at Greenwich University

May 21, 2018

Thanks to Emily Critchley I got to premiere one of my new films made with Joshua Alexander (the animal series about london and menace - this one was Canalimal about the grand union canal around willesden junction and its soon disappearance at the hands of an ugly development) at the Uni of Greenwich for a conference entitled South of the River.

It was a lovely long afternoon with peers i respect in a little troupe - amy cutler, tom chivers, edmund hardy - speaking to each other and academics about south london. I admitted i had something against south london, half joking, and its a place that hasnt featured too much in my 11 years of walking miles upon miles of london streets. I learned a lot from everyone else through the day, it was communal and generous.

Kakania IV at the Austrian Cultural Forum – March Thursday 26th 2015

March 10, 2015

The Kakania project closes its program for now with a grand event at the Austrian Cultural Forum, just off Hyde Park, in London. Four new commissions, and four new iterations of previous commissions blend poetry, avant-garde music, performance art and video art, all from contemporary artists and poets each responding in their own unique way to a figure of Habsburg Vienna around one century ago.

George Szirtes reads poems on Arthur Schnitzler
Ben Morris offers experimental music on Ernst Krenek
Joshua Alexander screens his video art on Paul Wittgenstein
Emily Berry reads poems on Sigmund Freud
Colin Herd reads poems on Oskar Kokoschka
Fabian Faltlin performs in response to Otto Wagner
Stephen Emmerson shares things in response to Rainer Maria Rilke
eff Hilson reads poems on Ludwig Wittgenstein

The event is completely free, but please do use this link to book your place
http://acflondon.org/literature-and-books/kakania-iv/

Both Kakania publications, the Kakania anthology with over 40 contributors, and Oberwildling: On the Life of Oskar Kokoschka by Colin Herd & I, will be available to buy at the event.

Once this phase of Kakania is complete, the remaining copies of the books will be available online and the anthology will have a special reading launch in June at the Hardy Tree gallery in Kings Cross, London.

Also in situe at Kakania IV will be books from the imitable Pushkin Press, who have generously supported the Kakania project and who publish some of the finest authors of the era we are emploring. http://pushkinpress.com/kakania/

Thanks too to Theodora Danek, Elisabeth Kögler and the team at the Austrian Cultural Forum and all those who’ve helped make the project so special. www.kakania.co.uk

a Cemetery Romance - March 28th at Kensal Green Cemetery

March 9, 2015

A Cemetery Romance http://www.theenemiesproject.com/cemeteryromance

March Sat 28th : 2pm : at the Gates of Kensal Rise Cemetery : Free Entry
in partnership with the Czech Centre London http://london.czechcentres.cz/

To celebrate the visit of avant-garde Czech artist, and professional gravedigger, Miloslav Vojtíšek (otherwise known as S.d.Ch.) this special one off literary tour of the magnificent Kensal Green Cemetery, facilitated by a guide, will feature Miloslav explaining the art of exhumation while being joined by a host of British poets, who will also present their work on death and dying, including Emily Berry, Tom Jenks, Alex MacDonald, Scott Thurston & many more. We will visit the graves of JG Ballard, Harold Pinter and others, before exploring the Dissenters Chapel Catacombs.

The event is completely free to attend but please RSVP at info@czechcentre.org.uk

http://london.czechcentres.cz/programme/travel-events/miloslav-vojtisek-cemetery-poetry-reading/

The group will meeting at 2pm in front of the Kensal Green Cemetery main gate, near the intersection of Harrow Road and Kilburn Lane http://www.kensalgreencemetery.com/ With thanks to the Friends of Kensal Green Cemetery

http://london.czechcentres.cz/programme/travel-events/miloslav-vojtisek-cemetery-poetry-reading/

Kakania at the Freud Museum - January 22nd 2015

February 3, 2015

A more beautiful, more fitting setting could not be found for Kakania than the house of Sigmund Freud during his last days in London, now a museum. The Freud Museum showed us the same generosity so many have around the Kakania project and we were allowed to commission five new works, each by a contemporary artist, each taking place in a different room of the house. It's very rare to be able to present works in such a rarified space, one curated so carefully, but also one that maintains a fluency that would us to walk nearly 60 people from room to room on a tour of performances.

We began with Emily Berry reading beautiful new poems appropriated from Sigmund Freud's beautiful correspondence before moving onto Tom Jenks new conceptual work on Otto Gross, read in the exhibition room, Eros around him. We then moved into Anna Freud's study, where the remarkable performance artist Esther Strauss was asleep on Anna's original couch. Esther had stayed up for a whole day to make herself tired enough to sleep, to dream in Anna's room. It was a mesmerising and unforgettable performance. We then moved downstairs where Dylan Nyoukis resurrected Raoul Hausmann in the dining room before Jeff Hilson finished the event, reading his Wittgenstein poems in the landing.

A major highlight for me, as the first Kakania had been, as a curator. To be able to work with such a calibre of artists, thanks to the Austrian Cultural Forum's generosity, and to launch our two new original Kakania publications too, it was a satisfying feeling. I've long wanted to perform or organise in the Freud Museum also in fact it was a motivation for me to develop Kakania to work in that space, having had a long relationship with Freud's text. In the light of these artists works, the museum became something new to me, and Im sure the audience too felt this was a special evening.

Thanks to Lili Spain for all her support. Pictures below by Wanda O'Connor.