the book as shelter - an open exploration
some starting points >>>>>>>
GHOST CARGO 2011
Leeds, Writing Encounters, Leeds & Refugee Week 2011
the letter O
sans serif: a perfect circle
sculptural, empty, container or passageway
CROP 2018
John Hansard gallery, Southampton
Nocturnal - to not see to not know
how/where
step by step
letters as moving mass
depths and constellations
Drift (2015) - texts, performance, soundwork, electronic text (in collaboration)
text mass: a moving changing book / form / mode
contemporary and historical sources, original writing
A1 print, text-work + sound install for group show
Danielle Arnaud Gallery, Art & War, March 2025
Text and sound work created for Nattsong performance
REFUGIO (Seeking Shelter) printed text-work + sound
Etymology and uses
Because we need shelter.
The Language of Literature”, in Azadi, 7
live drawing
khadi paper, wet, ink, live voice - YT recording
120325. A week in and entering the library of the HMI everyday for the past 10 days with an open-ended project or idea
is an increasingly daunting exciting overwhelming prospect.
I approach it through the artists I think I know and let the stream develop from there
In practical terms this also allows me to bring a close to my 2026 book with a few quotes I was missing: Agnes Denes, Song Dong.
These readers, out there on the front lines, already being singed by the spreading fire,had an entirely different idea of what literature is or should be. I mention this because it taught me that the place for literature is built by writers and readers. It’s a fragile place in some ways, but an indestructible one. When it’s broken we rebuilt it. Because we need shelter. I very much lie the idea of literature that is needed. Literature that provides shelter. Shelter of all kinds.
Arundhati Roy
080325 this quote has been with me for the past few years.
I use it when I think about the millions on the move, and wonder about the purpose of my presence/work/life given all this. It helps me to measure the role of writing and art in relation to its direct connections with its readers/audiences. Rather than a less measurable suffering world at large.
Yet the vision and the commitment of the work stems from sth larger.
develop my workshops, when I think about my 2026 book, and has led to this project wanting to take root.
Q1. what is a “literature that is needed”? what is art that is needed?
Abeer Seikaly
“Weaving a Home”
This design uses a unique structural fabric composed of high-strength plastic tubing molded into sine-wave curves that can expand and enclose during different weather conditions, and also be broken down to allow an ease in mobility and transport.
Jordanian female architect
13.5 million Syrians internally displaced or are refugees outside Syria. Abeer creates these self-contained tents.
week 030325
Agnes Denes
"Snail Pyramid – Study for Self-Contained, Self-Supporting City Dwelling – A Future Habitat" 1988
shell terra ?
Derived from the Semitic Taw 𐤕 of the Phoenician and Paleo-Hebrew script (Aramaic and Hebrew Taw ת/𐡕/, Syriac Taw ܬ, and Arabic ت Tāʼ) via the Greek letter τ (tau). In English, it is most commonly used to represent the voiceless alveolar plosive, a sound it also denotes in the International Phonetic Alphabet. It is the most commonly used consonant and the second-most commonly used letter in English-language texts / wikipedia
T for shelter
shell terra ?
120325
120325
Remembering discovering Kim Sooja through a recording in Aural Sculpture in 2007. Listening to it nonstop on headphones as I was working in NY / Bard. The tibetan chant underlying the agitation and firetrucks sirens of the city. Provided me with immense sense of internal safety or refuge. This memory and deepening my approach to her work feels like a pathway.
KIM SOOJA
BOTTARI
Traditional Korean bed cover used to wrap and protect personal belongings.
Representative of essential belongings and a nomadic lifestyle. Kimsooja extends the bottari concept to architectural spaces, transforming a room or building into a transcendental experience by wrapping and weaving light, sound, and reflection
Q2. avec les moyens du bord
à partir des moyens du bord
receiving vast quantities of use clothes and preparing the bottaris.
Volunteer & KS: When we left Algeria we had to leave v quickly and we did the same: on mettait tout dans des ballots
Cities on the move: bottari trucks - 2007, MAC val de marne performance
Japanese Furoshiki
lunch carrrier handkerchief
the folds
carry the box by the knot
Ursula K. Le Guin
CARRIER BAG THEORY OF FICTION pp. 30 - 34 - 36
d'Apertutto, or Bottari Truck in Exile 2.5 ton truck stacked with Bottaris, 20m x 6.5m mirror structure 49th Venice Biennale, Arsenale, Venice 1999 - dedicated to Kosovo refugees
250325
“the novel is unheroic…”
“I would go as far as to say that the proper fitting shape of a novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us”. 34
Q3. the emergencies that require shelter of materials, knowledges etc
Brathwaite and the hurricanes and his library
150325
Scrolls and Folded pages/ Envelopes
LEWITT FOLDS
Fold piece - 16 Squares -1972
POETIC PRACTICES AND RESISTANCE TO/ REINVENTION OF THE BOOK
CONCRETE POETRY / PERFORMANCE PRACTICES
Folded paper -1971
270325
camouflage as shelter
secret language/writings
many examples within poetry
go back to McCaffery Book
+for ex.
Sonnet L’abbé through Shakespeare’s sonnets
original intention of dazzle camouflage to disorient when viewed through periscope
WW!, first used 1917
origin: artist Abbott H. Thayer (1849–1921) published an article entitled ‘The Law Which Underlies Protective Coloration”
the link between art and camouflage
Surrealist war camouflage WW2
Book claiming material / organic forms / containers
Trees - Umbrella
Rock - Nesting
O-Caves
Umbrella
Nesting
Caves
Wrap
Envelope
Layer
200325
Ann Hamilton
various scales intimate handling
petite moyene et grande echelle
Performance of objects
Pragmatic structures
Craft / Assembly
SOETSU YANAGI
RICHARD SENNETT
Over time, my question: “What is making?” has enlarged to consider how the act and experience of reading might form the tactile material of my makings. Though we may sometimes find ourselves reading in public, say on a crowded subway, for the most part when we read we read alone and silently. We are absorbed between the covers of a book. And although we might return from reading’s singular immersiveness forever changed, we remain physically unmarked.
love her work but always found it sinister and bizarrely apolitical her burning off of texs in books - now I wonder what she feels (USA 2025)
note “how art makes connections and promotes interactions among concepts, objects, spaces, and human beings. Her talk will challenge the audience to reconsider their existing perceptions of art through a lens of social engagement.”
ALEC FINLAY - HAIKU PLATFORM
Patterns: pattern-making
to contain ? to distill? to navigate ? to hide text?
getting to one’s own comprehension of abstraction
works for shapes, does it work for language/text?
Inner refuge: Mandala
Black paper and graphite
semi-hides the text / protected?
the mineral quality of the graphite
david nash wooden boulder
organic times of making and letting be, documenting the process over time, 35 years on the move
