This interactive book, edited by Hari Marini and Barbara Bridger, and artfully designed by Westrow Cooper, celebrates a ten year project created by the Part Suspended Artist Collective, and is available from
https://tearsinthefence.com/pay-it-forward/
SPIRALS, a collaborative multidiscipline, multilingual project involving artists with a shared feminist perspective, spanned a decade of activity from 2013-2023. Using the symbol of a spiral as an inspiration, a series of performance rituals, artistic interventions, performance writing, audio-visual manifestations, online projects, exhibitions, and theatrical events took place in the UK, Europe and beyond.
The book is divided into three parts. The first part explores time, topos, arrival and longing. The second part considers isolation, Covid and Women’s writing, spirals, circles, galaxies, turning points and breath. The third part features the SPIRALS open archive and selected contributions to that archive from 2022. Lockdown, with its enforced period of contemplation, and the associations of spirals as a geophysical feature serve to contextualise the juxtapositions of different languages and cultures within a common humanity. The work is profoundly ethnographic, feminist, and celebrates a togetherness and unity as opposed to division and conflict at a time when populist nationalism began to widen its appeal.
Involving poets, translators, and artists from throughout Europe, SPIRALS transcends the constraints of linear time and space, spiraling in and out of temporal boundaries. It initiates conversations that traverse waking and dreaming realms, navigating through cityscapes and landscapes, and forces the reader to think and feel more laterally. The interplay between interiority and exteriority creates a tapestry that invites contemplation and engagement through time and space. As Niya B writes in the poem, ‘an end and a beginning’:
every seed carries its own memory
every skin carries its own history
every body carries its own weight
every step carries its own intention
every soil carries its own dead
The anthology includes a series of QR codes enabling the reader to access videos and other documents from a tapestry of collaborative events during a tumultuous decade. SPIRALS offers a ritualistic probing of origins, naming and time through the cycles of birth, life and death, ethnographic and archival materials, appendices, editorial notes, preface, and colour artwork. It is a joy to read.
Amongst the contributors are Niya B, Suparna Banerjee, Barbara Bridger, Sarahleigh Castelyn, Sally Pomme Clayton, Noèlia Diaz-Vicedo, Georgia Kalogeropoulou, John London, Erini Margariti, Hari Marini, Simon Persighetti, Nisha Ramayya and Beatriz Viol.
David Caddy 10th July 2024
