CALENDAR

29/09

– final broadcast

7–15/09

– exchange week 2

11–17/07

– exchange week 1

11/07

– reading group 4

London

6–8pm

• Platform Tent
  Long Wall Ecology Garden
  Off the Greenway by Abbey Mills
  Newham, London

sign up

Listen / chat during the London reading group at
) Listening room (

20/06

– reading group 3

Berlin

7–9pm

• Zabriskie – bookstore for culture and nature
  Reichenberger Str. 150, 10999 Berlin, Germany

sign up

London

6–8pm

• The Pier House
  Hermitage Community Moorings Ltd
  London E1W 1NG

sign up

16/05

– reading group 2

Berlin

7–9pm

• Zabriskie – bookstore for culture and nature
  Reichenberger Str. 150, 10999 Berlin, Germany

sign up

London

6–8pm

• The Pier House
  Hermitage Community Moorings Ltd
  London E1W 1NG

sign up

18/04

– reading group 1

Berlin

7–9pm

• Zabriskie – bookstore for culture and nature
  Reichenberger Str. 150, 10999 Berlin, Germany

sign up

London

6–8pm

• Small Cafe @ Lea Bridge Library
  Lea Bridge Rd
  London E10 7HU

sign up

READING GROUP

See the calendar for times, locations & to sign up.

A radio project linking the rivers Spree and Channelsea in Berlin and London through a series of creative exchanges and public broadcasts.

As part of the project, we would like to organise a regular reading~listening group to develop our thinking together across the project (and gradually establish lasting bridges between the vast networks of actors from both rivers).

Themes reflect our interests and activities in each location, as well as previous work on the rivers with radio and boats. Keywords include:

• flows
• infrastructures
• transmission ecologies
• rivers

places

The group will take place monthly at about the same time in each city. Each group will meet in a physical location, with options for online connections later on, perhaps on Mezcal.^*

In Berlin, we will work with Zabriskie, an independent book shop with a history of hosting reading clubs, including the series: Between Us and Nature.

In London we will meet first at Lea Bridge Library and later at the floating Pier room, Hermitage Wharf, with the possibility to find other locations over time.

The listening dimension of the gatherings won't focus on specific listening exercises. Instead, we would like the sessions as a whole to be attentive to the relational, situated, attuned, and multi-sensorial qualities of listening^** – encouraging a collective engagement with ourselves and our surroundings.

There will be at least 5 meetings, coinciding with the development of the radio project between rivers/cities.

times

• 18 April (Berlin, London)
• 16 May (Berlin, London)
• 20 June (Berlin, London)
• 11 July (London)
• 12 September (Berlin)

From 19:00 to 21:00 (Berlin); 18:00 to 20:00 (London)

readings

We propose to begin with two texts in common. After that, each group will choose one thing to read next, and we will read both selections together.

1. Daniela Medina Poch: 'Aqualiteracies: Understanding (and sensing) water as a hybrid data carrier'
   
   Chus Martinez: 'Fishes Should Not Be Taken from the Deep!' in Tidaletics: Imagining an Oceanic Worldview through Art and Science. Stefanie Hessler (ed).
   
   
2. Rolando Vázquez: 'On Listening' in Vistas of Modernity: decolonial aesthesis and the end of the contemporary. Jap Sam Books 2020.
   
   Stefan Helmreich: 'Radio ocean' in Tidalectics: Imagining an Oceanic Worldview through Art and Science. Edited by Stefanie Hessler. MIT 2018.
   
   Nan Shepherd: 'The Living Mountain.' Chapter 4. Aberdeen University Press, 1977. Canongate Books 1996.
   
   
3. Transfiguring the Anthropocene. Stochastic Reimaginings of Human-Beaver Worlds by Cleo Woelfle-Erskine and July Cole
   
   Caught By The River Extract: Bill Drummond's The Penkiln Burn
   
   
4. Tomlin Order between Port of London Authority and Al Cree (Surge Cooperative)
   
   Casper Bruun Jensen: 'Amphibious Worlds: Environments, Infrastructures, Ontologies' in Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 3 (2017), 224-234

further resources

The following texts are part of the resources for the reading~listening sessions. They will not necessarily be read during the series but serve as references to the scope of this group:

• Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan & Nils Bubandt (eds).
• Becoming Salmon by Marianne E Lien in Arts of Living.
• Beyond boundaries: Earth's water cycle is being bent to breaking point in Bodies of Water. Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. Astrida Neimanis.
• Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies. Sean Cubitt.
• Fluid Pasts: Archeology of Flow. Matthew Edgeworth.
• influx & efflux – writing up with Walt Whitman. Jane Bennett.
• Infrastructures of flow: streaming media as elemental media. Justin Grandinetti, Chris Ingraham.
• Interplanetary Machines.
• Gathering Waters. Basia Ireland.
• Liquid Scale: Trans-scalar Thinking and the Perception of Water in In Water in Social Imagination: from Technological Optimism to Contemporary Environmentalism. Scot Slovic.
• Methodologies of Kelp: On Feminist Posthumanities, Transversal Knowledge Production and Multispecies Ethics in an Age of Entanglement. Cecilia Åsberg, Janna Holmstedt, Marietta Radomska.
• Rowboat Phenomenology. Angela Sakrison in Slow Spatial Reader – Chronicles of Radical Affection. Carolyn F Strauss (ed).
• Sounding the Mississippi by Margarida Mendes in Radical Sympathy.
• The Ashley Book of Knots. Clifford W Ashley.
• The force of listening. Lucia Farinati, Claudia Firth.
• Synchronies at Risk: The intertwined lives of horseshoe crabs and red knot birds. Peter Funch in Arts of Living.
• The Invention of Rivers. Dilip da Cunha.
• The Sacred and the Superfund in Braiding Sweetgrass. Robin Wall Kimmerer.
• Thinking with Water. Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod, Astrida Neimanis (eds).
• Transfiguring the Anthropocene: Stochastic Reimaginings of Human-Beaver Worlds, July Hazard & Cleo A Woelfle-Erskine
• Water: A Queer Archive Of Feeling in Tidaletics: Imagining an Oceanic Worldview through Art and Science. Astrida Neimanis.
• Wet Dream. Erin Robinsong

connect

• Grant, Mort, Dawn at Soundcamp (London)
• Monaí, Kate at Archipel Stations/Radio Otherwise (Berlin).

ABOUT

Spree~Channelsea Radio Group will involve two week-long exchanges, on the Channelsea river in East London and the Spree in Berlin.

We will set up a floating sound lab in each location, as a mobile platform to explore the social, organisational and environmental ecologies of the rivers, their shores and inter-tidal zones.

We will run a series of live radio transmissions bringing the rivers and their people into contact.

credits

Spree ~ Channelsea Radio Group is a project by:

• Archipel Stations
• Blanc Sceol (Stephen Shiell & Hannah White)
• Radio Otherwise
• Soundcamp
• Surge Cooperative

We are grateful for the framework and support provided by the Cultural Bridge Fund. Cultural Bridge brings together The Goethe Institue and Arts Council England to create cultural projects between the UK and Germany.

Logo & design by Sam Baraitser Smith.