Living Words : Catalan Poetry and Performance / April 10th 2022 2pm Iklectik Artlab, London

with performances by Mireia Calafell and Björt Rùnars / Amy Cutler / Maria Sevilla and Joan Martínez / Mischa Foster Poole / Laia Martínez and Jaume Reus, known as Jansky / David Spittle

A remarkable afternoon of live Catalan literature, celebrating the innovative and performative brilliance of six contemporary Catalan poets and musicians. Representing a new wave of poets to whom experimentation and performance are core to their understanding of literature, and held at the remarkable Iklectik Artlab in Waterloo, this event also featured three British poets, presenting brand new live works in response to the visitors - in acts of homage, collaboration and playful hospitality.

Maria Sevilla Paris was born in Badalona, in the suburbs of Barcelona (Catalonia), in 1990. She studied Catalan Philology in the University of Barcelona, where she now teaches Catalan language and literature, and she started a PhD about the only novel that Maria-Mercè Marçal wrote: The passion according to Renée Vivien. She has never finished her thesis, but has written some books of poetry. The first one, Dents de polpa («Pulpy teeth»), won the XXX Bernat Vidal i Tomàs literary award, and in 2017 her second book, Kalàixnikov («Kalashnikov»), won the Miquel Àngel Riera award. In 2020, she won the 4th Carles Hac Mor literary award with the plaquette if true: false; else: true, and in 2021 she has published Plastilina («Playdough»). She is also the author of pieces of sound poetry created together with the mathematician Joan Martínez. Her poems have been translated into Spanish, English, Croatian, Turkish and Lithuanian, and since January 2019 she is one of the three event producers of the Horiginal, the oldest and most important annual season of poetry in Barcelona.

Mischa Foster Poole is interested in an interdisciplinary poetic praxis and the theoretical politicopoetics of nonsense. His first collection, unboxing, teardown, is published by Veer Books, and last year he was awarded second place in the Ivan Juritz Prize (textual category). He is currently pursuing a PhD in nonsense at Birkbeck.

Jansky is a duo based in Mallorca, who came up with the tag 'electroverse' to define their live electronic performances. A rave of synthesized organic sounds, beatbox flutes by Jaume Reus, and Laia Malo's unique poetry and voice. Upcoming fourth album, Insecta Dance Music, adds science to this already 'total work of art' project. Since 2013, they tour the world and have received awards like the SUNS Europe 2018 and the Museum of Sound/BBC3 Sound Of The Year 2020.

After publishing “Tantes mudes”, that received the Lletra d’Or for the best book published in Catalan in 2014, Mireia Calafell published in the year 2020 Nosaltres, qui, receiving the Mallorca Poetry Prize and the Josep Maria Llopart Prize for the best collection of poems of the year.

Dr. Amy Cutler is an audio-visual artist, experimental geographer and writer based in London. She specialises in forms of expanded cinema and publication which explore unusual overlaps between species, spaces, fieldtrips, elegies, archives, and the legacy of landscape. This includes soundscapes, open-air projections, and multi-media films. Recent acoustic ecology projects include her ultrasonic ambisonics composition LULL based on Borssele’s radioactive vaults (most recently presented at IRCAM FORUM in Paris in March 2022), her recent nocturnal residency with The Nest Collective in Stroud (April 2022), and her most recent commissioned film, The Video Book of Orchids (2021). Her internationally touring live cinema concert NATURE’S NICKELODEONS, dedicated to the democratic roots of nature exhibition, most recently took place at The Exploratorium, San Francisco. Non-fictional writings include the booklet Thinking Like A Fossil (2021) and the collaborative book Conversations With A Forest (2022), released as part of a film festival which took place exclusively for an audience of trees in Ruberslaw, Scotland. As a musician, Cutler’s albums include Örö Tape (Fieldtrips of the Damned) on Fractal Meat Cuts (2020), GUTTER on Misophonia Records (2021), and The end (also ends) of (the) earth and variants on Crow Versus Crow (2021). www.amycutler.net