A note on: The EVP Sessions & The Black Dinner performance - November 14th 2015

The original EVP tour was a major turning point in my work with performance, being able to tour the UK with really wonderful artists like Hannah Silva and Ross Sutherland, and with the support of Nathan Jones and Tom Chivers (www.stevenjfowler.com/evp) When the opportunity to do a one off commission for the same project, at Shoreditch Town Hall, I had a clear thought to what I might do, melding both my original work for the project with a tradition I've had for three years now, being painted as a skeleton on or around the Mexican Day of the Dead. I first did so in Mexico City and try to do so every year in homage to my friends in Mexico, and because much of my work is about the symbology of death.

For this performance I was really lucky to have the amazingly generous artist and make up artist Amalie Russell paint my face professionally. I had then spent a few days covering a whole banquet of food in black paint and lacquer, and my performance, a fluxus meal of sorts, was to set the table and invite diners to join me. I waited outside the fire exit of the venue on a typically vapid Shoreditch saturday night and felt it appropriate to wait in the rain. The performance was accompanied by a track made in collaboration with the remarkable musician Alexander Kell, who did an incredible job mixing my reading of Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo, one of the authors I had discovered in Mexico.

"Electronic Voice Phenomena returns with a series of electrifying live sessions featuring the very best in hauntology, spoken word, glitch noise and performance. The EVP Sessions takes its inspiration from Konstantin Raudive’s notorious Breakthrough experiments of the 1970s, in which he divined voices-from-beyond in electronic noise. Enter the labyrinthine basement of Shoreditch Town Hall and experience a “mind-boggling”, “perplexingly good” avant-garde cabaret of human, ghostly and machine voices. http://www.electronicvoicephenomena.net/index.php/shoreditch-town-hall-london/"

Poetry in Collaboration exhibition at the Poetry Library closes

The brilliant photographer Alexander Kell joined me as I visited the Poetry in Collaboration exhibited I've curated over the last two months at the Saison Poetry Library with Chris McCabe just before it closes. Im very proud of the exhibition, its carefully chosen, beautifully presented and easy on the eye. Its been a pleasure working with Chris too, and to have had so many people see the work is a wonderful thing, it's the premiere place to have a show like this in London. Hopefully not the last time Ill get to work with the library and its amazing collection.

Museum of Debt online

Emanating out of Chris McCabe's groundbreaking collaboration course for the Poetry school, a new web resource for collaborative poetical material has been set up and features some of my work with the photographer Alexander Kell, called the Museum of Debt. http://newcollaborations.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/s-j-fowler-alexander-kell-museum-of-debt/

The Museum of Debt is an exploration of the unspoken in a contemporary British workplace – most specifically a workplace where the task in hand is the preservation of dead objects – inanimate historical trinkets which pass on their own ossification to their watchmen & watchwomen, and breed a myriad of depressions. Between the concussion of photography and irony of poetries, so the Museum of Debt is about mortality, and a mild form of waking death. Both poet & photographer involved were involved doing the job they documented. A project of internal projection with an innately shared set of meanings and experiences. The photographs were taken then the poems were written

xxxiv. the thin blue line between front of house &  back of house
short devil
o how I often want to bite my fingers off
when attending Events I must attend
that I hesitated to attend
my inner race, my struggle (translated)
my emotional poetry reading & racing
I’m pregnant, inseminated while winning
every rugby match that has ever taken place
so tired, in pajamas, with a boy
how he bites my clitoris, I believe a bear trap
is a forceful face in shadowy water
you tall devil, I
surrender