is an artist, writer and editor living between London and New York. She works collaboratively with individuals and organisations to develop publications, workshops and events promoting experimental and interdisciplinary approaches to creative practice with a focus on formal innovation at the intersection of art and writing. Her visual work is analogue and lens-based. Her research interests include site writing, metafiction and mythopoesis.
Bella Marrin
Currently:
- Editor-in-chief of Fieldnotes
- Broadcasting monthly with Resonance 104.4FM
- Teaching (occasional) art writing & ‘publishing as practice’ at the School of Art and Design UWE, Chelsea College, University of the Arts London and elsewhere
- Freelance workshop delivery, writing, editing and proofreading
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FOLDING THE KNOWN
Workshop seriesA watching and writing workshop investigating the language of memory, with a focus on process, practice and conversation. Films and texts provided departure points for poetic enquiries into themes of record and reality, fiction and forgetting, emergence and erasure. We moved through systems of notation, memory palaces and portals, dissident archives, hive minds and redacted records as we considered how our writing is shaped by and shapes our memories. The first two iterations of this series took place at CCA Goldsmiths (in partnership with the Feminist Durational Reading Group) and at Broadside Glasgow, with support from Arts Council England and Creative Scotland.
The series is inspired by what the filmmaker and writer Trinh T. Minh-ha has termed ‘the fold of the known’: the narrative tension between knowing and unknowing (‘Cotton and Iron’, 1991).
Films watched & references shared:
Blight by John Smith
Self Portrait in Green by Marie NDiaye
Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
I only wish that I could weep by The Atlas Group
Lore by Sky Hopinka
Chroma by Derek Jarman
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WOR(L)D-BUILDING
Workshop seriesA workshop series exploring making meaning by turning towards and away from language. Through experimentation with systems of mark-making and notation, participants investigatd the shapes and shades of meaning at the edge of language and understanding. Focusing on conversations and process rather than outcomes, a series of prompts guided our writing towards performative world-building through the visual and sonic body of language. Funded by Arts Council England, Creative Scotland and the Charles S French Charitable Trust.
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FLOOD
Workshop seriesA public workshop series developed in partnership with METAL Culture and Cement Fields exploring place-making poetics across coastal and riverside spaces in the South East of England, investigating the tensions underlying shifting landscapes, intertidal zones, living systems and anonymised processes of de/composition. Part of the FIELDNOTES public programme funded by Arts Council England.
This project involved fieldwork at sites along the Thames Estuary including Two Tree Island, Dartford, Purfleet and the Isle of Sheppey.
The project culminated in a radio broadcast and the publication of a limited edition folio bringing together some of the exercises, prompts, responses and references that were shared and produced during the programme.
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FIELDNOTES ISSUE 6
EditorThe fifth issue of FIELDNOTES contains new writing and artwork from Anne Carson, Joe Clark, Elijah Jackson, Manuela De Laborde Noguez, Jonas Eika, Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg, Ocean Vuong, Vanessa Billy, D.S. Marriott, Stephen Emmerson, Kidist Amberber, Robert Beavers, Natasha Cox, Gregory J. Markopoulos, Chris Kraus, Emmett Lewis, Tava Tedesco, Flo Ray, Imane Boukaila, Chris Martin, Adam Wolfond and Rasha Abdulhadi. Funded by Arts Council England.
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.
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FIELDNOTES EVENING SCHOOL SERIES I & II
TeachingA programme of online sessions aimed at emerging writers and artists, structured around communal reading and writing, geared towards the creation and cultivation of new text-based works. The Evening School engaged with a variety of works across genres and forms as a means of uncovering and unsettling intimacies and potencies within textual matter. With a focus on poetic experimentation, sessions involved collective and independent exercises, polyphonic readings and open discussion, with the purpose of generating new approaches and fostering future collaborations. The programme followed a discursive and non-hierarchical learning model with participants actively involved in shaping its format and structure.
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
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SONIC COMMONS
Radio ProgrammingA radio series broadcast monthly on Resonance 104.4FM, co-commissioned by FIELDNOTES and Cement Fields, funded by Arts Council England. SONIC COMMONS explored the phonic substance that exists between things, shared commotions and resonances, collective and collaborative ways of making. Resulting soundworks were composed by Rob Shuttleworth, the series was researched and developed by Bella Marrin assisted by Gina Prat Lilly, produced by James Elsey and presented by Katie Lane.
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SATURNALIA
Workshop seriesA residential workshop focused on process and poetics to mark the pagan festival of Saturnalia. A collective session exploring rhythm and ritual in writing, starting with the calendar as an organising principle and deploying different units of measure as structures to write with/in. Including a discussion of works by theorists and poets such as Giorgio Agamben, Lauren Berlant, CAConrad and Bernadette Mayer.
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BREAKING OPEN
ProgrammingA night of experimental film at The Cube cinema in Bristol, curated by Natasha Cox and Bella Marrin (FIELDNOTES). Breaking Open brings together three works which invite the viewer into intimate encounters with internal worlds, the screen becomes a skin which is touched, is touching. The audience becomes a co-conspirator, complicit in the construction of these spaces and presences which are arranged between the real and the imagined. Like three islands these filmic landscapes are connected underneath.
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
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Machinic Writing
Workshop series TeachingA workshop series developed for participants on Freelands Artist Development Programme 2023 and for students in the Department of Kinetic Imaging, VCU School of the Arts. The series involves experimenting with different forms of collective writing to explore the idea of machinic writing: using systems, schemas, modelling and mechanisms to cumulatively create metafictions and poetic responses.
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?
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FIELDNOTES ISSUE 5
EditorThe fifth issue of FIELDNOTES contains new writing and artwork from Josephine Pryde, Fred Moten, Ren Ebel, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos & Fionn Petch, Marie NDiaye & Jordan Stump, Dana Ranga & Christina Hennemann, Sirkhane Darkroom, Lauren de Sá Naylor, Eileen Myles, Markéta Fagan, Sam Cottington, Margaret Tait, Luke Fowler, Sarah Neely & Peter Todd, Mary Ruefle, John Smith, ‘Hal Washington’, Dabin Kim, Alex Aspden and Philip Ewe. Funded by Arts Council England & Cockayne Grants for the Arts.
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?
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Against Writing
Workshop seriesA performative and practical writing workshop series commissioned by Somerset House Studios as part of their Artist Development Programme, these sessions aim to discuss and differentiate poetics and precision from flattened, institutionalised artspeak, in the interest of creating purposeful writing that retains meaning and relevance.
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The Sensuous Grid
Film ResearchThe Sensuous Grid is a short 16 mm film currently in production, it is a response to the research project ‘Infrastructural Narratives’ led by researchers at Queen Mary University of London and Fudan University, Shanghai, funded by the British Academy
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.
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Fieldnotes Issue 4
EditorThe fourth issue of Fieldnotes contains new writing and artwork from Adeola Titiloye, ajw, Fanny Howe, Will Alexander, Michael O’Mahony, Agnieszka Szczotka, Renee Gladman & Isabel Mallet, Can Xue, Karen Gernant & Chen Zeping, Tony Brooks, Nwuguru Chidiebere Sullivan, Mat Jenner, Alba Schloessingk, Camille Roy, Pete Segall, Johanna Hedva, Beihua Guo, Cedar Sigo and KP Culver. Funded by Arts Council England.
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.
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Zoning
Workshop series TeachingAn eight-month programme of site-specific workshops exploring techniques of place-based writing. Part of the Fieldnotes public programme, co-facilitated by Elaine Tam, funded by Arts Council England & The Paul Mellon Centre, hosted by South London Gallery, Pushkin House, Whitechapel Gallery, Open House Festival and Thamesmead Arts & Culture Office.
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.
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The Dominant Animal
ProgrammingA screening event exploring the relationships between species viewed through the prisms of domination and desire. Including works that connect violence, landscape and care; merging documentary and fictional modes to produce strange new intimacies.
Programme:
O Peixe [The fish], Jonathas de Andrade, 16 mm transferred to HD
SaF05, Charlotte Prodger, HD video
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Eye Marks
Film ResearchCollaboration with Bakersfield research platform (artists Emma Kemp and Matthew Altman) funded by X-TRA, a filmic survey of the landscape of Dungeness and the church of St Clement’s on Romney Marshes in 16 mm. Footage was presented at Night Gallery and François Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles in September 2021.
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.
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Slow Compression
ProgrammingA live performance event bringing together works dealing with the distortion of language, image and sound as they pass through different systems of translation: encoding, compressing, exporting, transporting, transpiling, indices, ciphers and codecs. Funded by Arts Council England.
Including performances and contributions from Mónica Rivas Velasquez, Frances Young, Yan Jun, Li Song, Zara Joan Miller, Holly Antrum and Billy Steiger.
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Fieldnotes Issue 3
EditorThe third issue of Fieldnotes contains new writing and artwork from CAConrad & George Finlay Ramsay, Charlie Hawksfield, Yvonne, Angus McCrum, Peter Gizzi, McKenzie Wark, Kate Paul, Michelle Williams Gamaker, Georges Bataille & Rachelle Rahmé, Declan Wiffen, Rosa Barba, Travis Jeppesen, Robert Glück & Arnold J Kemp, Cecilia Pavón & Jacob Steinberg, George Lynch and Yuhan Shen. Funded by Arts Council England.
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.
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THE GARDEN HAS GONE MAD
ProgrammingA short programme of screenings and performances to celebrate the publication of Fieldnotes Issue 2. The evening will involve films and performances sharing the themes of ecological anxiety and analogue dissonance. Including performances and contributions from Ana Vaz, Keira Greene, Zara Joan Miller and Ute Kanngeisser.
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
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Fieldnotes Issue 2
EditorThe second issue of Fieldnotes contains new work by: Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Steve Dutton, Liesl Ujvary, Akio Yuguchi, Evan Lavender-Smith, Dodie Bellamy, Paul Maheke & Giles Bailey, Yan Jun, Emily Charlton, Ed Atkins, Sam Buchan-Watts, Elizabeth Price, Mary Mussman, Carolyn Ferrucci, Hanne Lippard, Charlie Godet Thomas, Hannah Regel. Funded by Arts Council England.
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?
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Fieldnotes Issue 1
EditorThe first issue of Fieldnotes contains new work by: Lauren Berlant & Kathleen Stewart, Wytske van Keulen, Zara Joan Miller, Estelle Hoy, Rob Halpern, Ana Vaz & Ben Rivers, Matthias Connor, Wythe Marschall, Sarah Mangold, Patrick Keiller, Helen Marten, Lulu Wolf, Emily Hunt Kivel, Amparo Dávila trans. Audrey Harris & Matthew Gleeson, Ulrike Almut Sandig trans. Karen Leeder, Malcolm Bradley & Juliette Pépin, David Manley, Eloise Lawson. Funded by Arts Council England.
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.
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Bunker
Exhibition PublicationA vitrine exhibition of drawings and collages displayed at the artist-run 4M2 Gallery in Paris. This work later became a text of the same name which was published online (2020) by FormIV and in print (2022) in Subtexts, an anthology of geopoetic & sublithic works published by the Geopoetics Research Group, funded by Goldsmiths College.
‘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.
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Slow Motion
Exhibition Publication ResidencyAn artistic residency (2013) at La Fragua in Andalusia, Spain, led to an installation (2014) in the exhibition space of the Convento de Santa Clara in Belalcazar.
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).
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RADIO OFF
RadioA monthly interview series exploring experimental and hybrid uses of sound and noise in creative practice. Episodes inclued: meeting curator Mark Beasley / meeting Nicholas Bullen of Napalm Death / meeting artist Guy Gormley / meeting filmmaker Beatrice Gibson / meeting musician Luke Younger. In partnership with The White Review.
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VIDEO ARCADES
RadioA broadcast series exploring ideas of place and non-place, broadcasting new soundworks, spoken word and interviews. Episodes: ‘Landscaping’ with Patrick Keiller, Tacita Dean & Matthew Gregory; ‘Material futures’ with Luke Fowler, Ed Atkins, Mark Fisher & Richard Sides; ‘Flat time’ with the John Latham archive & Stuart Whipps; ‘States of place’ with Chris Petit, Patrick Langley & Steve Roden. In partnership with The White Review.
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Aelion Sounds
ProgrammingAelion Sounds was a programme of events, radio broadcasts, interventions and performances involving artists, musicians and writers which took place at Offshore Pavilion, a temporary structure erected in Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre. Supported by Art Licks.
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.
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Cine España
ProgrammingThe Cine España film programme took place in a disused cinema in the small rural town of Frailes in Southern Spain. The cinema was opened to the public for the first time in fifty years for a series of events, readings and screenings.
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.
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Farringdon Factory
ResidencyFarringdon Factory occupied a seven-story office building in the City of London transforming it into an open studio complex hosting a programme of live events, screenings, installations, performances and talks. The building became the site of a residency programme and cinema space, encouraging open discussion and experimental interventions. Curated by Natasha Cox and Keira Greene of 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.
