Sensing Place

Panelists

Nicola Streeten (chair)

Nicola is a multi-award-winning UK based graphic novelist and comics scholar. She draws, talks and writes about, mentors and teaches subjects relating to comics, feminism and humour to everyone! Her methodology is friendship.

Satya

Satya is a multimedia artist and independent researcher from Bombay, currently in Munich via Chicago. She works with text, sound, music, image and translation. She questions landscapes of the social, interpersonal and the self within urban and online spaces; perceptions of space and place, memory and loss. At her core she is concerned with the city of Bombay, which is the subject of her music album Seven Blue Seas. She has performed and recorded with Jazz and improvised music groups in the US, Europe and India. Satya’s writing has appeared in Elsewhere Magazine, hākārā journal, Almost Island and NDTV’s art blog, among others. Her first video was part of the 4th World Congress of Psychogeography, Huddersfield, in 2020. 

Fann Xu

Fann Xu is a Chinese/Swedish artist, designer and performer exploring our emotional and sensorial relationship to our material and built environment. Through an interdisciplinary approach to making and research, she investigates the embodied experience of time and space. Xu holds a BA in architecture and dance from Bennington College, and a MFA in Design from Konstfack University of Arts, Craft and Design. She recently completed her MRes degree in Architecture at Royal College of Art where she explored how we can use writing as a tool to convey the emotional, sensorial and visceral relationship to the spaces we inhabit. Her work has been exhibited the U.S. and across Europe.

Christina Hogg

Christina Hogg is a spoken word artist and lyricist with a Diploma in Creative Writing from Oxford University, currently developing her first collection with Arvon course funding. She performs at open mics and Poetry Festivals extensively online, and at Poets Cafe and Paris Spoken Word in person. With her ‘Made in Sheffield’ backstory, it made sense to share material with Sheffield City Library poets. From recent songwriting set deep in the Peak District to works traversing the North/South divide set on the rural River Thames where she now lives, her poems are suffused with scenery. With another hat on, ChristinaFanMail takes the Popstar Hair Show to premiere at Edinburgh Fringe, full run in August 2022. Here’s one punk poet besotted with the Male Muse, rewriting fan mail to empower! Coming soon are community projects Men on the Northern Line – A Field Guide and the sequel, River of Women – Heavy and Light Flow.

Abstracts

I Worry About Touch

Lockdown virtuality and the pretence of contact that it brought for some got Satya thinking about the anxiety of navigating landscapes of IRL online, and an excess of movement through virtual space atrophying the tactile. What does it mean to lose touch with place? A video essay.

Our First Home

Fann Xu’s performative reading of Our First Home is part of a larger research project called Stories of Spaces, which explores writing as method to touch the immaterial qualities of our built environment, and the sensorial, corporeal and emotional experience of the spaces we inhabit. How does it feel like, smell like, age over time? Our First Home centres around the womb as a site. How do we attend to this bodily knowledge? How does it shape the way we relate to the sites that come after? How does it colour the way we regard belonging? The reading has an audience participatory element,

All That’s Left is the Mountain

All that’s left is the thin line/ the mountain

I go to see it, I feel like it/an extra walk

run up the hill

we all take a view

in Sheffield (everyone do)

I take a view

its a hill its

not truthful

All that’s left is a mountain