Forum #22 - Emma Bolland with Ceri Morgan

17 Jun 2021

Emma Bolland will present Instructions from Light, a hybrid novella / long poem that turns on a translation and ‘writing through’ of Louis Delluc’s impressionist screenplay Le Silence (1920). This work will be considered alongside extracts from texts by Anne Carson and Maria Fusco.

Emma Bolland is an artist and writer whose practice includes an investigation of the problematics and ambiguities of an expanded understanding of translation—between languages and language codes, and between modes of writing, reading and speaking. Emma is a co-editor at Gordian Projects, an Associate Lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University, co-runner of Radio oHPo, and were the 2019 #interrupteur artist-writer in residence for the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Sheffield. Recent publications include ‘Subjects of the Gaze: script development as performance’, co-authored with Louise Sawtell, in Script Development: Critical Approaches, Creative Practices, International Perspectives, eds. Craig Batty and Stayci Taylor (Palgrave MacMillan 2021), ‘The Fiction of the Essay: Of Abstraction, Texts, Communication, and Loss’, co-authored with Elizabeth Chakrabarty, in Imagined Spaces, eds. Gail Low and Kirsty Young (Voyages Out, 2020), and Over, In, and Under (Dostoevsky Wannabe, 2019). A bilingual English/German audio work will be included in the forthcoming exhibition imPERFEKT —eine Ausstellung zur Barrierefreiheit, MEWO Kunsthall, Memmingen, Germany. – emmabolland.com

Ceri Morgan is Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Keele University and works on literary geographies, place-writing, geopoetics (site-responsive creative practices), walking studies, and geohumanities. A specialist of Québec fiction, Ceri has worked on projects on Montreal, ’urbs (suburban, exurban, and rural spaces), and regions. Key themes besides the spatial include language and translation, mobilities and belonging, memory, temporality, and identity. Since 2014, she has worked increasingly on geopoetics as a participatory practice, and has led workshops on a variety of themes, including mining, food, persistent pain, and deindustrialisation. In April 2020, Ceri set up an online reading and writing group, Microclimates, in response to social and spatial restrictions prompted by the pandemic. She has published some fiction, creative nonfiction, and prose-poetry, notably in Littoral (2017), GeoHumanities (2019), and NAWE Writing in Education (2020). Her prose-poem, ‘Avenue Bernard’ was broadcast on RTE Radio 1 extra and RTE Radio 1 in Spring and Summer 2020.