Nowhereisland comes to Bristol

I will perform a new text commissioned by Tertulia and Spike Island Associates in Bristol on 7th September in response to Nowhereisland. The artist Alex Hartley’s project for the Cultural Olympiad has been described by Situations as ‘a work of land art for our time … above all sculptural – a provocative act of material displacement by a visual artist.’ My new work Dr Freezelove on Ice will consider Hartley’s ephemeral utopian project in the light of the work of climate scientists extracting ice cores from Svalbard glaciers and US military interventions at the North Pole.

Tertulia is a regular event for people working with or interested in language, writing and dialogue across disciplines, founded by Phil Owen and Megan Wakefield.

Tertulia: 14th July 2011

A Tertulia? The Discreet Charm of the Bourgoisie, Luis Buñuel

‘Tertulia’ is a Spanish word ordinarily applied to social gatherings with literary, artistic or bohemian overtones. "One would speak of ‘going to a tertulia’ as in ‘going to a dinner’," explain Phil Owen and Megan Wakefield, founders of Bristol’s Tertulia - a salon for people working with or interested in language from a range of different disciplinary and methodological perspectives.

Tertulia is held in the Reading Room at the Arnolfini. The next salon falls on Bastille Day, 14th July, 7.30pm (free entry). Responding to a gauntlet thrown down in Cambridge last month, I’ll be presenting How to say ‘I love you’ in Greenlandic through performance rather than print, re-imagining it as a sound work that befits the oral culture it documents. I’m looking forward to seeing the other contributions, particularly Rachel Flynn’s analysis of Graham Sutherland’s writings on the landscapes of Wales and Mary Crowder’s subversion of medical texts. Not to mention the coda: ‘Sam Playford-Greenwell will attempt to balance a banana on his head.’