Upcoming: Soundings - a project with Hubbub & Wellcome Library

Soundings is a series of collaborative performances I will be presenting from August 2015 to October 2016, in conjunction with Hubbub and the Wellcome Library. There will be ten editions, each in a different location in and around London, each with a different collaborator.www.stevenjfowler.com/soundings

Soundings

Each edition of Soundings will begin with Wellcome library staff raiding the library's extensive collection to suggest items, including images, manuscripts and books, in response to a title inspired by the Hubbub's research strands and initiated by Hubbub curators. These prompts will form the basis for the public performances of sound poetry, sonic art or conceptual performance, devised each time by myself and my collaborator. Collaborators include Emma Bennett, Dylan Nyoukis, Maja Jantar, Patrick Coyle, Sharon Gal, Tamarin Norwood and James Wilkes, with more to be announced.

Hubbub are the first residents of The Hub at Wellcome Collection, an international team of scientists, humanists, artists, clinicians, public health experts, broadcasters and public engagement professionals. We explore the dynamics of rest, noise, tumult, activity and work, as they operate in mental health, neuroscience, the arts and the everyday. I'm fortunate to be part of this extraordinary enterprise, as a poet and artist in residence, and you can read more about my work with Hubbub here: www.stevenjfowler.com/hubbubor www.hubbubgroup.org 

Soundings #1: August 18th
at Camley Street Natural Park
with Emma Bennett
Time: 1pm – 2pm (12 Camley Street, London N1C 4PW). Free entrance.
www.hubbubgroup.org/soundings

Soundings #2: September 4th 
at Wellcome Collection Late
with Dylan Nyoukis
Time: 19.40 and 21.30 (183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE). Free Entrance 
www.wellcomecollection.org/events/friday-late-spectacular-hubbub

Soundings #3: November 18th
at St Johns on Bethnal Green
with Maja Jantar
Time: 8pm to 9pm (200 Cambridge Heath Road. London E2 9PA). Free Entrance.
www.stjohnonbethnalgreen.org

Kakania at the Freud Museum - January 22nd 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.


Everybody's people

I performed twice for the Voice art night. An epic experience for me hard to put it into concise sentences of any cogent value...newness, consistently attempting to find discomfort in the growth of new work and collaborators and practises has led to some of the most creatively profound experiences this year. It was a farewell to Ben - a friend who had given so much to me - a new world's poetry - a reluctant educator  - a moment he passed over to me something significant just before he leaves for China. and on top, to do this in tandem with dylan nyoukis - a true pioneer, a batwing sound artist, and for us to achieve real moments of synthesis fused was amazing, quite emotional. All I can say is that it felt overwhelming to be a part of a creative moment harrowing love happening live in a room full of very generous warm spirited people. It was also great fucking fun and shall not be quickly forgotten. Another Muay Thai poem, where 666... was attempting to be attritional and meditative this was intended as amusing energetic and explosive and still retain the sense of authenticity of practise amidst the silliness so vibrantly Central to old school sound poetry practise. Chris page again is a fine friend to help