Bella Marrin

We are just visiting the world at this moment and it’s on fire. We find it dissolving into an orange fog, there is no volume around it, no beach, no reverie. Here is a text column of smoke reaching into the night as if the sky were sucking us up, this book is a red flag of mourning, a blue bruise. Poems are not marvels/They are war zones. Something attacked the earth last night, was it us? Whilst lying face down in bed, sensing variances of being, so suddenly ancient. We came together in a supermarket car park shouting about types of plastic types of plastic types of plastic. We climb a mountain to find a perfect blue square of sky among the clouds like a motion picture screen, like a blank page, we pull out a kidney and fling it across to see ourselves trailing behind it like shooting stars. From here everything feels like a road, every road an exit route. Leaving the earth is unnecessarily complicated but regret is the ultimate test of endurance. What is this thing? A new issue of FIELDNOTES, a return which is also the beginning of something.

We cannot know for whom the text will become a riot, a notice, a wormhole, or mote.
—‘On Editing’, Lauren Berlant & Kathleen Stewart (2020)

Two cohorts of fifteen participants were run in parallel over the course of six weeks, led respectively by Bella Marrin and Elaine Tam (FIELDNOTES).

Indicative reading list:
Fever, J.M.G. Le Clézio
Last Words from Montmartre, Qiu Miaoji
A Life Full of Holes, Driss Ben Hamed Charhadi
Riddley Walker, Russel Hoban
The Ruined Map, Kōbō Abe
Float, Anne Carson
Dictee, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
On Breathing, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi

How we live:
I look into my face in the square glass.
Under it, a bright flow of cold water.
At once, a strong arrangement of presences:
I am holding a small glass
under the little flow

(From BREAKING OPEN by Muriel Rukeyser)

PROGRAMME:

El mar Peinó a la Orilla [The Sea Combed the Shore] by Valentina Alvarado Matos
Ashes by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
As Without so Within by Manuela De Laborde Noguez

This project involves fieldwork at sites along the Thames Estuary including Two Tree Island, Dartford and the Isle of Sheppey.

What is a machine? An assemblage of interrelated processes and parts producing forces, movement and power. During the workshops we interrogate this definition to generate new works and further questioning: What machinic operations are involved in poetic expression or the production of meaning?

What follows is an exercise in unlearning the human language: we are folding the edges into the centre, knotting neural pathways, disarticulating limbs and lines, disassembling ourselves across interfacial and intrafacial layers, between violence and care. This machinic being is skewed towards scattered outliers, this misfitting is deliberate. Words placed side by side in the correct order are limited to performing their functions within a closed system, this doesn’t interest us. We want to know: are you feeding the machine or is the machine feeding you?

Inspired by JMG Cortazar’s short story ‘The Southern Thruway’ and the idea of a terminal traffic jam The Sensuous Grid focuses on the Dartford Crossing, the busiest estuarial crossing in the United Kingdom. The film presents the crossing as a lived habitat rather than a space of transit, foregrounding other non-human temporalities and reflecting our experience of travel as increasingly characterised by blockage and rupture.

The fourth issue of FIELDNOTES is an organism composed of many oscillating units, like suns that sway or intensify according to various systems of balance, freely interacting and allowing for plasmic flows to form bonds between membranes. The collective behaviour of the constituent parts drives the organism’s locomotion.

The writing workshops experimented with methods such as concrete poetry, psychogeography and frottage as means of responding to the urban landscape, creating systems of observation and notation. Drawing from works by writers including Robert Walser, Georges Perec, Kōbō Abe, Raymond Queneau and Anne Carson we considered how acts of mapping and mark-making also imbricate poetry and the performative, inviting participants to explore and envisage techniques of notation between writing and drawing. Through a series of short informal exercises participants were encouraged to experiment, with a focus on process rather than outcomes.

Programme:

O Peixe [The fish], Jonathas de Andrade, 16 mm transferred to HD
SaF05, Charlotte Prodger, HD video

St Clement’s is notable for its ‘squints’ or hagioscopes, apertures which frame and reveal the altar to the congregation. Inspired by Robert Glück’s account of religious rapture in Margery Kempe and the medieval figure of the ‘anchorite’ who lived in an enclosed chamber, the only opening to which was a hagioscope through which to view the altar, the film seeks to apply the notion of sublime vision to the landscape of Dungeness which itself is framed by the cinematic legacy of the filmmaker Derek Jarman who is buried in the graveyard of St Clement’s.

Including performances and contributions from Mónica Rivas Velasquez, Frances Young, Yan Jun, Li Song, Zara Joan Miller, Holly Antrum and Billy Steiger.

We are happy to be moving outside our cupboard/office with the fan heater cooking our brains out on a daily basis, happy to be escaping our awful glowing heads zooming in their screen boxes and to find ourselves in the real world and in your hands, dear reader. We present you with this new issue which is another way to say: WE ARE STILL ALIVE.

Evening, shortly. Outside, the woodlice/hold an amorous feast. And in the evening,/I am very over –

‘The Garden Has Gone Mad’, Miruna Fulgeanu, 2020

In this issue: we wake up, we go to sleep, paths are drawn through the forest. We are waiting for the flood, we are waiting for the dog star to bring fever, rains, catastrophe and music of the highest vibrations. Here are some notes on how to survive, this issue is a survival guide. Diagrams are saying things and we are learning new lines ~ the first line is a line of sight between predator and prey, these are nutrient-rich lines, between shopping aisles, between what is eatable and what is not, between the wood and the trees there is continual elaboration. We are learning preservation techniques, how to be safe & good, how to cut & come again, how to fall in love, how to dance with your lover, we learn how to build a bunker, we learn to dip the rat in oil before we eat it, we learn to collect plastic from the bins and melt it together to make new containers, to contain new questions: has the disaster happened, is it coming, or are we in it?

We present a new publication called FIELDNOTES! Or: something like a dog digging a hole, like a rat digging its burrow, carefully excavating like an armoured Caterpillar D9 Bulldozer, or grasping an eel hiding in a tank, reading between the lines of a field of chinese cabbages, dig em’ up dig em’ up!, mudlarking for old teeth or vague religious feelings, following the flight path of a bat, from BOOZE to BEES to LIES, like hangmen drawing lines between unstable coordinates. (We cannot know for whom the text will become a riot, a notice, a wormhole, or mote.) 23.03.2020, you sent me an email: The garden has gone mad, any chance this is the right summer? It was the right wrong summer for a new venture, the first thing was a third thing, it took us a year to reach Issue 1. We present a collection of works, or fragments dissolving under the tongue, tracking beetles on a picnic rug, to a screaming pot on the stove.

‘Nothing can penetrate as far as this. Nor can anything slip through stone walls and escape. It is the end of the world here, its heart, its skull, its fist.’ A bunker is created by the imagination of an outside, but do you really believe in reality? Ah yes. Three horizontal bars carved into the trunk of a tree, a stream parting to make a Y meaning YES, seabirds circling over a patch of the ocean, a trail of encrypted signals indicates our location, and I never left a trace other than these steps of infamy.

Works included a projected series of 35 mm slide images, the projection was synchronised to a recording of Joan La Barbara’s ‘Circular Song’ and accompanied a sculptural work consisting of a raised platform and a sand drawing. The image sequence was later published as a short video work ‘Wild Meanings’ in FormIV (2015).

The pavilion itself mutated and developed over the course of the project; acting as an animated archive as each work was embedded within the evolving structure. The project responded to the peculiarities of the site of the shopping centre, an arcade of aberration, threatened with demolition. The programme was produced by Offshore Projects. Offshore Projects (2011-2017) was a collaborative migratory offsite research-based arts programme co-founded and directed by Natasha Cox, Keira Greene and Bella Marrin.

The film programme was delivered in partnership with the cinema’s owner, Fermin Murcia, who helped with the building’s construction while still a child. The programme was supported by LUX and Video Data Bank, filmmakers included Ben Rivers and Rosa Barba. The curation of the programme focused upon the specific site and structure of the cinema: its history and possible futures. Expanding outwards from this it aimed to trace within the cinematic experience the shared patterns and grain of communality and celluloid. The programme was produced by Offshore Projects. Offshore Projects (2011-2017) was a collaborative migratory offsite research-based arts programme co-founded and directed by Natasha Cox, Keira Greene and Bella Marrin.

Offshore Projects (2011-2017) was a collaborative migratory offsite research-based arts programme co-founded and directed by Natasha Cox, Keira Greene and Bella Marrin.