CAROLINE BERGVALL

Caroline Bergvall is a poet, artist and vocal performer. She works across art-forms, media, histories, languages. Her practice integrates many ways of working and of collaborating across disciplines. Outputs include books, performances, installations, audio-works, drawings, essays. Her current performance cycle Sonic Atlas includes various live works each exploring the thresholds between song, speech, breath, conversation and ambient sounds. The cycle includes the outdoor sunrise performance Ragadawn and the live discussion-sound work Conference of the Birds. Her most recent book Alisoun Sings(2019) concludes a trilogy of poetic works – all published by Nightboat Books - exploring medieval and contemporary sources. It opened with the collection Meddle English: New and Selected Texts (2011), and was followed by Drift (2014) which was awarded a Cholmondeley Award for Poetry (2017) and a Bernard Heidsieck Art Literary Prize by the Centre Pompidou (Paris 2017). She was a Judith E Wilson Fellow in Poetry and Drama at the University of Cambridge (2014), Writer-in-Residence at Whitechapel Gallery (2015), and a Mellon Fellow in Collaborative Arts at the University of Chicago (2016). She is currently Visiting Professor in Medieval Studies, Kings College London. The piece ‘Another Great Unhoming’ was written for PLACE 2020 as a way to create a basic mapping of movement, and of thoughts during the early months of global lockdown, using the first letters of the alphabet and the expression ‘go from A to B’ as her organising principle. She was thinking of the ways in which prisoners or patients measure their allocated space and the passing of time as a way of staying sane and retaining a sense of self. Writing the piece released her from the paralysis she had been plunged in. She is now also using it as the opening section to her spoken video-work Sonoscura, created subsequently and collaboratively during this lockdown.