Field Notes: Your Nocturne Reading List!
Join Nocturne on a literary journey as we count down to this year's festival, Nocturne: Ground. Festival Curator Marite Kuus has compiled a reading list with texts that have influenced her conceptualization of the theme, Ground. Read along with us and look for weekly highlights on our socials!
1. Richard Long : Walking in Circles. 1991
This publication surveys esteemed land-based artist Richard Long's work which has paved the way (no pun in intended!) for contemporary land art. As curator Marite Kuus puts it, Long "used his feet to make art in collaboration with the ground.
Available through:
2. Wanderlust : a history of walking, by Rebecca Solnit. 2001
In the first chapter of Wanderlust, Solnit describes walking as “an activity that require[s] openness, engagement and few expenses”. It is an activity that allows us to directly engage with our surroundings, which Solnit explores poetically in her writing.
Available through
3. Walking Methodologies in a More-Than-Human World : WalkingLab by Stephanie Springgay & Sarah E. Truman. 2018
Have you ever considered walking as a research methodology? In this publication Stephanie Springgay and Sarah E. Truman, who also co-direct Walking Lab, discuss how walking can be used as an embodied approach to knowing the world.
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4. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures, by Merlin Sheldrake. 2020
In “Entangled Life”, Sheldrake reveals the magical world underneath our feet. He delves into the interconnectedness of fungi and lichens, how they interact with each other and build supportive networks. The book reveals an inspiring way of life that we humans could learn from the non-human communities that thrive alongside us.
Available through:
5. The Science Underground: Mycology as a Queer Discipline by Patricia Kaishian & Hasmik Djoulakian. 2020
In this paper published in Catalyst, a journal focusing on feminism, theory and technoscience, Kaishian and Djoulakian argue that the resilience and community building that is evident in mycelial networks is an inherently queer trait. They discuss the history of mycology, how it wasn’t accepted in mainstream science and how this narrative reflects histories of queer communities.
Available through Catalyst (open access).
6. Gathering Moss : A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, by Robin Wall Kimmerer. 2003
This book brings focus onto a small, often overlooked plant that tends to hide in plain sight. Wall Kimmerer interweaves her scientific knowledge as a professor of botany with indigenous knowledge from her upbringing.
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7. Soil: A Black Mother’s Garden by Camille T. Dungy. 2023
Soil documents how Dungy, a poet and scholar, reclaimed the land her house stood on, by planting a garden of native plants in a majority white community with restrictive Homeowner’s Association rules that uphold colonial attitudes to land management. A quote from this book is a key starting point for this year’s Nocturne theme: “What I want most from this life is to keep learning where and how to look.”
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8. Nancy Holt: Inside/Outside, by Lisa Le Feuvre and Katarina Pierre. 2022
9. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. 2015
The Mushroom at the End of the World weaves a story of life in capitalist ruins through the magic of mushrooms.
Available through:
10. The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs. 1961
Jane Jacobs is one of the key proponents of walkable cities. Jane’s Walk events are hosted in her honour annually around the world, corresponding to her birthday on May 4th. This book is a key text in urban planning and designing cities for people.
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11. Underland, by Robert MacFarlane. 2019
MacFarlane explores land and ground through “deep time”. Geological time is vastly different from our time, human time, and by thinking through a different time, we can also find different ways of being.
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12. Walking as Research Practice, WARP & Soapbox Journal. 2022
“Read me while you walk. Hold me while you stand. Put me down while you take a pause. In the process of developing this issue, we came up with several ways of incorporating the theme of walking into the design of the book. Eventually, we wanted to leave the liberty to the reader to flick through the pages and find different routes. The cover and the provided structure of page numbers are only a suggestion. The book starts and ends wherever you wish and folds accordingly. The central question to the research became: What does the perfect book for reading while walking look like?”
Available online.
