‘We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvellous, but we do not notice it.’ Charles Baudelaire

“The most wonderful thing we can experience is the sense of mystery. It is a source of all true art and of all science. Whosoever has never felt this emotion, who no longer knows how to stop and meditate and remain transfixed in fearful admiration, is like a dead person.” Albert Einstein

“I find myself returning to the appeal of in-between spaces, thresholds and envelopes, of movement, departing and arriving, and dynamic errors with spatial implications such as leaning, slipping, disorientating, deviating, and blurring. These are characteristics tied to queerness which complicate binary notions such as inside-outside, self-other, the familiar-the strange.”
Extract from Rainbow Palace (2022) p.12, informed by thoughts from Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism (2020) and Fanny Söderbäck, Liminal Spaces: Reflections on the In-Between (2017).

“Acanthus offers poems that dwell in the landscapes of edges, of northern and southern hemispheres, of myth and fantasy – voyage and desire – as they oscillate between observation and finding one’s home.”

‘Reading is not looking at, it is connecting, filtering, and seeing through. In other words, it is experiencing what emerges in our interaction with the world of the text. When we acquaint ourselves with our environment, we participate in its making.’

‘A library of long lived truths. Of millions of experiences, of mistakes and setbacks, of burns and cuts, of saws and iron bullets during the wars, millions of stories, millions of lessons learned the hard way, all materialised into branches and leaves and bark.’ (Gert-Jan Stam, writing session in Pelt, 11 May 2022)

‘Each landscape, no matter how calm and lovely, conceals a substratum of disaster’.
Robert Smithson

The book is a choreography of the Isle of Grain.
A land dweller from here
To elsewhere.
From vigorous summer to another severe winter.

“The Deposition of Dust: interiority and presence in Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film: installation: 30.90852, Rotterdam (July 2021) is a critique of the assumptions of ecological neutrality at the base of interior spatial practices informed by Nam June Paik’s approach to emptiness and silence in film.”

‘The starting point for orientation is the point from which the world unfolds: the “here” of the body and the “where” of its dwelling.’ Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, (2006).

‘Grey.



The dark of night lingers into the light of day and the air is heavy with mist. Cloud reaches land; timeless, calm, listless.



Drizzle. I walk along an upwardly inclining path…’

Two crows, La Durée and Lo Dérive begin a corvidspondence across the ruins.

‘I mean the important distinction between the environment of the living system as it appears to an observer and without reference to the autonomous unit — which we shall call hereafter simply the environment — and the environment for the system which is defined in the same movement that gave rise to its identity and that only exist in that mutual definition — hereinafter the system’s world. The difference between environment and world is the surplus of signification which haunts the understanding of the living and of cognition.’

(Francisco Varela, Organism: a Meshwork of Selfless Selves, 1991)

Tell all the truth but tell it slant — (1263)
By Emily Dickinson

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant –

Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind –

In 2017, Station F, the world’s largest start-up incubator, opened as an anchor to the Paris Rive Gauche building development, the largest development in Paris since Haussman’s renovations, enticing new business to the capital. My site visit to Station F suggested an entanglement between the future-oriented space and its appropriation of the past through its reuse of an industrial structure. I used my camera and a recording application, capturing the sounds and simultaneously taking photographs as I traversed from the 12th arrondissement’s Pont de Bercy, and into the 13th.

‘Of the paths leading out of this history, the one I took has led me to consider the space and time of visual representations in which components of identity coalesce.’ Victor Burgin (2004)

‘Inscription and notation – making marks, lines, notes, images – are the foundation of human communication. This is the first journal to make these forms and processes its main area of inquiry. With an internationally distinguished Advisory Board and a diverse community of participating scholars and practitioners, Inscription is poised to create a vital niche within current discussions around media and information.’ – Johanna Drucker, Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies and Distinguished Professor, Information Studies, UCLA

The flat is coming to dawn. The wall, whose voices slipped back to a whisper in the cold hours, warms itself to a hum, faltering a little as it wakes like the tuning of a radio. The bookshelves grow amber and the chest of drawers picks up its dusty scent. Essences arrange themselves.

The new body transcends everything. It lives as accumulated labour-time from the billions of people tapping data value into blameless screens at every moment. This recategorizes the City as an archaic limitation, a nostalgic souvenir from the Anthropocene’s destructive History. And in its footprint are the city embers.

‘He sits with his father, unspeaking, holding the old man’s hand, father and son both drifting back to their respective childhoods. Fresh silences begin to emerge between them and the son reflects that far from framing absence, these silences are freighted with all that is now unutterable between the two.’

(excerpt from Andy Lock, Between Our Words I Will Trace Your Presence, 2020)

“… who, in ordinary life ever observes with such minute accuracy the decoration of a room? Who doesn’t limit himself to embracing the whole with a general glance, deriving vague and sometimes quite illusory impressions from it” (Praz, 1964) p.42.

Mario Praz (tr. Weaver, William) An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration from Pompeii to Art Nouveau (Thames and Hudson, 1964) p. 42.

narrative writing as art-based practice

“‘Linkages,’ ‘relationships,’ and ‘spider’s webs’ are some of the configurations taken by nerve information networks. Thus it appears that synaptic fissures are certainly gaps, but they are gaps that are able to form or take shape. That’s it, in fact: traces take form. It is striking to note that neuronal plasticity – in other words, the ability of synapses to modify their effectiveness as a result of experience – is a part of genetic indetermination. We can therefore make the claim that plasticity forms where DNA no longer writes.” (Catherine Malabou, trans. Carolyn Shread, Plasticity At The Dusk Of Writing, Columbia University Press, New York, 2010, 60)

‘An island is not the opposite of the mainland; it’s as connected as all parts of the earth are. It’s just that we can’t see it under the waters, nor can we see that the waters are what define all life.’ (from Island Bodies, my short essay on the works that inspired the film. See https://www.pennyflorence.com/new-page-1)

‘Perhaps KSEVT just was and will stay and irritate as long as it can.
And after, it might finally become a community centre, or a sleeping facility, or a restaurant, or a theatre, or a ruin… Or everyone will forget about it.
Or it will burn to the ground, and afterwards, the plants will grow over it transforming it into another hill where the sixth church will be built by the hands of people of Vitanje.’
From Vid Žnidaršič, A Non-Aligned Narrative in and Around KSEVT, (2019)

I never saw this strange dwelling again. Indeed, as I see it now, it is not a building, but is quite dissolved and distributed inside me: here one room, there another, and here a bit of corridor which, however, does not connect the two rooms, but is conserved in me in fragmentary form. Thus the whole thing is scattered about inside me, the rooms, the stairs that descended with such ceremonious slowness, others, narrow cages that mounted in a spiral movement, in the darkness of which we advanced like the blood in our veins.
R. M. Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, 1910

Each layer flavours the next, but none is the right one. There is no sense of editing or correction, there is no top layer.
N. Bourriaud, The Radicant, 2009

The still surface of the room constitutes four light grey plastered and painted walls adjoined at the corners, one white ceiling, and a floor of dark grey carpet. Fragments of stories pass through the door, each one utterly consuming, contributing towards the entirety of the known universe within.

Journeying allows grief because the journey has to stop: and that means the grief can’t last forever. The minute the train starts to pull away from the station I feel brave enough to cry.

Debt makes people behave in strange ways. It mirrors and magnifies both voracious human desire and ferocious human fear. It is the emperor without clothes, a toxic masculinity exposed; naked and flaccid. Since this mother of all crashes, it has become the new shame. Being Catholic was once shame. As were cigarettes, being fat, being a whore, uneducated, gay, divorced. Debt is high on the charts of shame.

David Harvey has observed that despite the increased deterritorialization of culture and ethnicity, identities that have an attachment to places resist the pressures of globalization, and indeed their elaboration ‘has become more, rather than less important in a world of diminishing spatial barriers to exchange movement and communication’.

“For there is no peril greater than the sea. Everything is constantly moving and remains eternally in flux.” Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).

This, we believe, was what early Liuerpulians called their Metropolitan Salem, fed by the waters of the Fever Fountain and all administered by that Spring’s Lunatic Professor. Later, the people would feast in the Congregational Drinking Sheds, entertained by performances from the Gospel Boxes.

In June 1919, Cardiff was the scene of four days of riots that left three dead, many in hospital, and buildings ransacked and burned in the hunt for black and Arab seamen. A day-by-day, hour-by-hour, scene-by-scene narrative to conjure people, places and incidents – pieced together from local newspaper reports.

‘Artists are not interested in illustrating theories as much as they may be in testing them. This is why artists may choose to ignore contradictions in a text or choose to explode those contradictions. The art work may be the lab experiment which attempts equally as hard to disprove as prove a point.’ – Mark Dion, ‘Field Work and the Natural History Museum’, Alex Coles (ed.) The Optic of Walter Benjamin, v. 3 of de-, dis-, ex- , (London: Black Dog, 1999), p. 39.

‘Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.’ – Hannah Arendt

‘To some degree, the histories of displaced objects are analogous to human displacements, migrations and exiles.’

‘To understand a thing is a bridge, but to explain it is a murder.’ – Carl Jung, The Red Book.

‘Wind tugging at my sleeve
feet sinking into the sand
I stand at the edge where earth touches ocean
where the two overlap
a gentle coming together
at other times and places a violent clash.’
From Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera (San Francisco: Spinters / Aunt Lute Book Company, 1987), 1.

Colour, texture, language, and the photograph, act as signs in these ‘site-writings’, which point to physical and sensory features of sites- whether these be architectural, artwork or emotional or philosophical concepts. The use of an ‘index’ questions what it is to ‘write’ site.

Walking is essential to understand the city because stories begin from ground up. Through walking, you can align your mind and body within the world around you.

It is a weekend, and I am in my father’s office. I look out of the window and see bulldozers moving across the edge of a plain of sand etched against the sea … I see ridges containing acres of shallow water foaming around streams of sand as it is pumped in.

‘I find myself stalking its perimeter…I can just about get close enough to make out, through grubby windows, a chaotic scene of bubble wrap and sterile plastic boxes set against a sickly Victoriana palette. Duck Egg and mauve floral motifs collage with my own conspicuous reflection—out of place and unwelcome.’

‘Consider the sublime. Is it possible that I feel this in sharper detail than most? Otherwise it seems impossible that this is not the only thing we talk about. That in lieu of the social we not just walk into the sea, sinking down to black and bleeding thick iron-blue’

‘9 September 1977,
and I write to you that I love the delicate levers which pass between the legs of a word and itself’
Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (1980).

‘The ‘Leguat’ island map acknowledges the mysterious immensity that lies beyond its authors’ geographic grasp, and does so with disconcerting subtlety. Hiding in plain sight, it is as if the large void at the centre of the image was too large to register as a source of ambiguity.’

I close the book. I contain the desire to disturb the silence of this room, to shout out your name and mark the beginning thus. Not a cry of love then, but a hypnotic cue: Wake up! And sink deeper into sleep.

The Glorious Tomb to the Memory of Nothing is a literary interpretation for locating and visualising the predefined use of punctuation beyond common reading methods, and thereby establishes a playful discussion of literary traces.

Intrigued by the fragmented visual sequence, the shape and rhythm of Shaun Tan’s The Arrival, I analysed this type of wordless narrative and conducted multiple readings in order to try to understand the author’s logic and tools. I found myself in a constant dialogue with him and his work. A visual of the whole narrative prevailed in my head, and subsided only when it took the form of a map as concrete image.

‘If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.’ – Juan Ramón Jiménez is quoted by Ray Bradbury in the epigraph of his book Fahrenheit 451 (2004).

‘It seems almost absurd – probably bordering on obscene – that there might be a blueprint in an air-conditioned sterile office somewhere for some flats […] as an alternative use for this site.’ Rich Hill, trustee of The Green Backyard (1)

‘If this was to be lost […] it would be a complete abomination to this city to have lost such a precious resistance where we don’t have to live life always being dominated by money.’
Chris Erskine, volunteer at The Green Backyar (2)

“With caretaker Stig Pallesen, I visited the building, recording our conversation with radio-mics. We wander through hallways, staircases, attics and offices, uncertain as to exactly where the chemist died, 90 years prior. When I returned, time had passed. The snow was gone, replaced by green grass and blooming trees and flowers. With me, I had the film The Death of the Chemist (2016) that was to be installed in the building.”

From The Death of the Chemist: Installation

“We are only stickers here. Third class citizens.”

Even though interviewees perceive themselves as ‘the other’ and resist change, they have to adapt to the ‘rules of the culture’ they live in, through tactics; yet interviewees also mentioned to me that some things in Dalston were done ‘the Turkish way’, suggesting a short circuit found in the system.

“The first report was signed by the ‘Borough and Water Engineer’ and dated ‘this day of the 12th Day of November 1958’. This was a succinct survey by someone who knew where to look. It mentioned ‘bore holes’; ‘pits of puddle core’; ‘cut-off trenches’; a ‘concrete draw-off valve tower with overflow pass’; a footbridge with ‘moveable bearings’; and of a ‘site outside the water limits’ …”

We are two artists, writers, publishers working under the name, A Published Event. Acutely aware of each other’s prospects, we move around these bodies that inhabit us. Evasive. Pleasing. Taunting. Chasing. This is how we write. Not always together but more often than not, in the company of each other. In tow, the wriggling off-white body and glossy plume of our relations.

“What is home, for a nomad?” If we start from a familiarity we call home and fly away betraying it, we familiarize ourselves with others only to betray them again. This is a secretive book that not only tells and shows story but also makes the reader perform it as well.

The past, in other words, is always contained in the present, not as its cause or its pattern but rather as its latency, its virtuality, its potential for being otherwise.
Elizabeth Grosz, (2000), ‘Histories of the Feminist Future’, Signs, 25:4, pp. 1017-21, p. 1020.

Penguins are undoubtedly old-fashioned in their appearance, but their looks are nothing like so old-fashioned as their history. They are really some of the most primitive behind-hand birds in existence.
Edward Wilson, ‘Some remarks on Penguins’, The South Polar Times, Vol. 1, April to August 1902, (London: Smith, Elder, & Co. 1907), pp. 3-9, p. 3.

‘Our Conversation took about 45 seconds. I explained the idea, which took about 40 seconds. ‘Great I’ll give you steel’ he said and that was it. In reality Arcelor Mittal has given so much more than the steel.’

Boris Johnson, Mayor of London on procuring the steel for the Orbit

“If……oral historians are interested in the full meaning of the spoken word then they must stop treating oral narratives as if they were reading prose when in fact they are listening to dramatic poetry.”
Dennis Tedlock, ‘Learning to Listen: Oral History as Poetry’, Boundary 2, Vol. 3, No. 3, The Oral Impulse in Contemporary American Poetry (Spring, 1975) p.725

… between the writing and the table there is a tension, which is the tension between a message and a surface, between something fluid and something static, between something supposedly written in the hand of God and a hand, all too human, trying to hold His wrath at bay…

Not disorientation but a shift in orientation. Going inward — turned backward. Inversion — to turn, change; turn inside out, to fold. Turn around on an axis; revolve — from volvere, to roll or wind. Turn over, rolling on the tongue; the release of language from itself. [Cocker/Thornton, The Italic I]

I am engrossed. I can hear everything and see everything. I take the performance in, fully formed. I am aware that there are others around me, watching too, seeing what I see. But my relationship is only with the stage, and what it wants to tell me.

between land and water 

between dancing and falling 

between dream and thought 

between now and later and then



on ever these same edges 

we build and write

because the lines

inescapably 

own us as we own them

‘Operating on its own constructions, history makes an incision with a scalpel in a body whose scars do not disappear; but at the same time, unhealed scars already mar the
compactness of historical constructions, rendering them problematic and preventing them from presenting themselves as the “truth.”’ (The Sphere and the Labyrinth, p. 12).

The trajectories that led me to these grounds – to what appears like a crystalline return to origins – are a meshwork of incidents, interests and work-related striations: a landscape to hide in, a landscape to master, or to die in. Following the advice of Deleuze and Guattari, I’m here to maintain my “small plot of new land” in the reckless pursuit of an on-going project whose aims and outcomes are uncertain.

Phantom Railings is an interactive public artwork that uses sound to highlight the absence of railings from a Bloomsbury garden square by recreating the ´ghost´ of its lost fence.

‘An echo cannot occur without a distance between surfaces for the sounds to bounce from. But the resonation is not on the walls. It is in the emptiness between them. It fills the emptiness with its complex patterning.’ Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), p.14

‘The possibilities of language are not only human and not only language’.
Stephen David Ross, ‘The Writing of the Birds, in My Language’, in Animal Philosophy: Ethics and Identity, ed. Matthew Calarco and Peter Atterton (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 190

Walter Benjamin, cultural theorist and writer wrote about the city through a series of ‘urban pen pictures’ – experiments in the representation of the city to capture the fleeting and contingent. These ‘thought images’ were a way of mapping personal history that modern society threatens to destroy.

They walk on cinders
to crowd the banks
Britannia, Mauretania, Monarch

he reads the next place to step
on slippery green

throned on my father’s shoulders
he remembers the zeppelin
I remember him

we watch them cast secret concrete
through holes in a tin fence

“Until the time of Aldrovandi, History was the inextricable and completely unitary fabric of all that was visible of things and of signs that had been discovered or lodged in them: to write the history of a plant or an animal was as much a matter of describing its elements or organs as describing the resemblances that could be found in it, the virtues that it was thought to possess, the legends and stories with which it had been involved, its place in heraldry, the medicaments that were concocted from it substance, the foods it provided, what the ancients recorded of it, and what travellers might have said of it.”
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences [1966] translated from the French (London: Routledge, 2002)

I was raised by storytellers, Carlo and Antonietta, clinging to their great pilgrimage after the war from a Sicilian hillside village to a council flat in Clerkenwell. My grandma whispers gran destino — meaning great destiny, her ninety-year-old eyes gleam. When she really means clandestino — illegal immigrants, her words updated and mutated as veins have darkened and courage wrinkled.

Remember, repeat, work-through. Sigmund Freud.

A semi-fictional journey through regenerating Newham investigating the spatiality of ageing from Plaistow to Canning Town. Featuring such notable places as the shelves in Poundland and that double avenue of trees in Beckton Park (gone missing).