CMRC Seminar - Side Quests: art walks, sonic maps and poetic paths
Event details
Side Quests is a collaborative project that integrates sound art, poetry, and participatory research to creatively reinterpret landscapes. The project is transdisciplinary and it explores the intersections of sonic art, ecopoetics, and philosophy, using walking both as a creative practice and a research tool. Side Quests is not a neatly packaged research project but an unpredictable series of art walks that reimagine the way we engage with landscapes. It investigates how to stumble upon the unexpected, and to provoke new ways of seeing, hearing, imagining. These walks are not guided tours but creative disruptions, inviting participants to challenge their usual ways of relating to place and embrace something messier and more spontaneous.
This seminar focuses on the first Side Quest, a walk that took place between Whitby and Sandsend that was part sensory exploration, part experimental performance, part creative chaos. Bryony Aitchison led a poetry workshop using onomatopoeic words in response to the sounds of the beach. Collaborator and multimedia artist Marilou Chagnaud’s wind objects—large sails-like objects held by participants to ‘map’ the wind—invited physical interaction with the environment’s unseen forces. Gaia Blandina's sound workshop used found beach objects, harmonicas, and the crashing waves to turn the landscape into focused solitary or collective activities, or into an impromptu jam. In the longest stretch of the walk, a long silent period allowed participants to simply be, with no instructions but to navigate and explore the sand, the subtle changes of weather, air direction, tides, and whatever might arise in that space of quiet and unpredictability.
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About the speakers
Bryony Aitchison is a PhD researcher at the University of York, funded by the AHRC. Bryony’s PhD examines queer gardens in the poetry and life-writing of modernist women writers. Alongside her research, Bryony runs nature-based poetry workshops, and she is also the author of Spanscapes and co-editor of GMC21: Twenty-first Century Architecture in Manchester and Salford, both of which were published by The Modernist Society in 2023.
Gaia Blandina is a cellist and sound artist with a practice-based PhD in sound art from the University of York. Her work integrates music, sound art, and visual art, exploring fluid, non-hierarchical creative processes through composition, improvisation, and curation. She investigates the intersection of theory and practice to develop idiosyncratic creative strategies.
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