Night & Refuge
Public Collaborative Writing Event
EVENT DURATION: 3 hours
LEAD ARTIST, HOST-POET: Caroline Bergvall
GUEST POETS: Leo Boix, Vahni Capildeo, Will Harris, Nisha Ramayya|
DIGITAL WRITING DESK: Mays Albeik
FILMING & EDITING: Andrew Delaney
SOUND DESIGN: Jamie Hamilton
OVERALL PRODUCTION: Caroline Bergvall
ARTIST STATEMENT
My motivation as a poet and interdisciplinary artist is to create live works that energize a personal engagement with one’s surroundings, with one’s time, and with others: spaces of respite and of shared critical spirit. My material is often rooted in languages, spoken, written, remembered, reclaimed.
With Night & Refuge, my focus was to initiate a live writing event between a few UK based poets, open to the public. Due to Covid-19 it took place online.
Photo credit: Screenshots, Andrew Delaney
OVERVIEW
On 20 May 2020, under the constraints of the global Covid-19 lockdown, I hosted a 3 hour long collaborative public writing event with four great UK-based poets: Vahni Capildeo, Will Harris, Leo Boix and Nisha Ramayya.
Stanzas of the poem replicated the stages of the night: Civil, Nautical, Astronomical Twilights, Night. The alternating tercets and couplets followed the ancient Japanese collaborative form of the Renga. Its insistence on seasonal thematics, which matches my Sonic Atlas projects.
OUR SEASON:
Late Spring of Covid-19. Confinement – Northern Hemisphere – early Evening from 6pm-9pm BST.
DIGITAL WRITING DESK:
A flexible platform developed with visual artist Mays Albeik allowed the poets and our audience to witness the poem as it was being written.
Open discussions accompanied the making of the poem: what is refuge, what of the night, its changing productivity, which constellations, how to write at this time of collective isolation, each with our complex sense of identity, of transhistorical hold and geo-mobilities.
Writers and readers got involved over Twitter providing comments, handwritten notes and poetic lines at #nightandrefuge. They became part of the fabric of the nocturnal event.
BACKGROUND
Night & Refuge opens the final stages of my ongoing cycle of performative works Sonic Atlas. These exist as part of my interest in setting up creative and exploratory dialogues and taking these into performance.
My focus this past few years with Sonic Atlas projects has been towards encounters with poets and language-activists who work with different minorised languages in the UK and EU, as well as with thinkers and practitioners from various fields.
Each work is framed by complicity, critical spirit, friendships across borders and artforms. To create performances that can exist as holistic sound landscapes: through which to experience, to breathe and to think together.
Sonic Atlas started with the sunrise performance Ragadawn. Into the afternoon and evening with Conference of the Birds. Led by Night & Refuge, the remaining projects will take place under the sign of twilight and of the night. The sign of gestation, insights, intimacy, and the re-emergence of collective archetypes. To be diving into the unknown of the night at this time of collective upheavals feels like a timely flow and a powerful ride.
The Night & Refuge film
Recomposed into an 19 minutes experience, it features a visually startling rendition of the event. It closes with the collective poem, read in 5 voices, a poetic audiowork against a changing filmed evening sky.
TWITTER WRITINGS
To be at this point where the poem ends is quite surreal! it’s approaching 4 am in Singapore now.
—Cat Chong
Going back to the eco-discourse earlier: climate change is changing our relationship to sleep and night. Higher temperatures are affecting sleep patterns
—Orchid Tierney
The darkness of the dark amplifies
the soundness of rooms – the loss of home
is the loss of the familiar darkness of sounds
—Saradha Soobrayen
As the night draws in and the heat somewhat recedes
—Theo Chiotis
The light shifting in Caroline Bergvall’s room is like a sixth poet asserting herself
—Allison Adair
The full unedited event
The 3 hour long zoom video traces the entirety of this public composition and all of its actants.
ASTRONOMICAL TWILIGHT (TOWARDS DAWN)
(FINAL STANZA, LB CB WH VC NR)
I was born at night
in the Southern Hemisphere.
My heart, upside down.
now in-between
knows k/nots
And downstairs [we] go
and the tap glows with liquid
sounds and [you] and [I]
Cry out like sailors: night’s empty
All the constellations are here
poetry as a skin between us, our oceanic bodies
passing like junk in the moonlight, like ghosts
at the fugitive houseparty, let’s not really leave
© Caroline Bergvall, SONIC ATLAS, and the poets
AUDIENCE FEEDBACK
“It was the totality of the various threads of writing, talk about writing, the stories, locations, medium and context that fascinated and moved me. I did take pleasure in watching the poets edit their text, rooting for my preference and learning from their choices—O, those lines breaks.”
“A good example of ‘slow art’: nothing was in your face, and it could have been boring very easily but it wasn’t for one minute.”
“Amazing how intimate it felt, and it was wonderful to connect with like-minded poets and thinkers from across the globe.”
“Collaborative work is a political act.”