Tuesday 21st May, 6.45pm – 9pm
Inspace, 1 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB

Syndicate hopes you’ll join us on 21st May for multimedia poetry, electronic music, zesty discussion over carbonated drinks and performances from Pierre Joris, Nicole Peyrafitte, Samantha Walton and Sean Williams under the theme: SWARM.

Pierre Joris has moved between the US, Great Britain, North Africa, France & Luxembourg for 50 years, publishing some 50 books of poetry, essays & translations. Recent publications include Meditations on the Stations of Mansur al-Hallaj (Chax Press, 2012) and Diwan Ifrikiya: The University of California Book of North African Literature (Volume 4 in the Poems for the Millennium series), co-edited with Habib Tengour. Forthcoming are Barzakh (Poems 2000-2012) from Black Widow Press, & The Collected Late Poems of Paul Celan, translated & annotated by Joris, from Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. He lives in Sorrentinostan, a.k.a. Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, with his wife, multimedia performance artist and writer Nicole Peyrafitte. For more information: www.pierrejoris.com/blog.

Nicole Peyrafitte, is a Gasco-Rican pluridisciplinary artist born and raised in the Gascon-French Pyrenees. Her eclectic background & her experiences in shaping identity across two continents & four languages informs her multifaceted works. Peyrafitte’s texts, voice, paintings,videos, & cooking were displays in, among others: Ninon; The Bi-Continental Chowder/La Garbure Transcontinentale; Whisk Don’t Churn. Her latest projects are “Basil King: MIRAGE,” a 2012 film she co-directed with Miles Joris-Peyrafitte, & “Bi-Valve: Vulvic
Spave/Vulvic Knowledge,” a series paintings, bi-lingual texts & performance (Stockport Flats, 2013). Her solo or collaborative work has been presented and/or performed in such venues as The Metropolitan Museum, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the University of Bordeaux, Birbeck College at the University of London, Poets House NYC, The Poetry Project NYC, Festival Occitania in Toulouse, Estivada de Rodez. For more information: www.nicolepeyrafitte.com.

At Syndicate, Joris and Peyrafitte will be performing: 

DOMOPOETICS: Personal & Shared Artistic Practices

Domopoetics is a performance that meanders dialogically between Pierre Joris’ poems, translations & thinking, & Nicole Peyrafitte’s drawings & videos, voice- & textual work.

Joris’ nomadic writerly processes & their insistence on a “barzakh” — a navigable archipelago of “in-betweens” — & Peyrafitte’s concept of “Vulvic space” — a homeomorphic topology or transformable conceptual space enhancing the exchanges between self & other(s) — come together in what can be called a “diastolic flux.” Theoretically describable as moving between a somewhat Deleuzian energy of plateaus & stages & a more Irigaray-ian awareness based on difference and infiltration, while always anchored in a processual practical poetics & art making, the couple’s collaboration started in the early 90s, & includes a range of duo multimedia performances, many book covers & illustrations, & the raising of two sons.

Samantha Walton is a poet and one third of Syndicate. Her recent project comes out of a creative residency at the ESRC Genomics Forum working on the relationship between lyric poetry and the life sciences and co-generating TTAGGG – an open source poetry sequence – with the help of social science researchers.

Sean Williams is a sound designer, recordist, and electronic and electroacoustic music composer and performer. He is currently a Leverhulme scholar at the Reid School of Music in Edinburgh, documenting historic electronic music performance practice.