a quiet precondition to the what of reading is the how one approaches their reach for, or their being with, the text.

the epigraphs – pertaining to the intentions preceding ceremony, a la Sylvia Wynter, and the authorship books have to the iterations of our being and becoming, quoting manuel arturo abreu – marks enactments of reading in the context of Black Waters, as essential architecture for incubating a collaborative spatial study.

invoking texts to establish and anchor the critical scaffolding for practices, while woefully not prolific, has a lot of precedent though it can often enclose theory and attendant poetics in abstract terrain; since books write us, how can we call for ceremony as a relational method for interpreting and metabolising meaning, which in turn generates indefinite constellations of knowledge?

moving towards the anecdotal, during a residency with David Dale Gallery in 2023 working with contributing player, sculptural and sonic artist bury nella heal, we rehearsed inter-material responses to the provocation of the Black Clyde. with a study concerned with reciprocal and mutative co-production with space, the phenomenological implications of text objects as material and compositional players threaded our commitment to citation via Black performance. propelled following a collective watch of Imani Mason Jordan’s performance of Black Drift, which threads a poetics of fugitive motion through fragmented citational genealogies of Black scholarship, initiated the ceremony of reading out loud to each other, and in listening, compose poetic collages, to then read aloud in recurring cycles.

troubling the textual/vocal divide through assembled exchanges of orality and aurality opened the text more sonorous qualities, which transmuted its form from a textual object to raw material for aesthetic production within a Black sonic arrangement. the support of mics, pa’s, loop and delay pedals; and the paradigm shifting passages from Jayna Brown’s Black Utopia’s, Katherine McKittrick’s Demonic Ground’s, Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake and Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return; inside this consortium of amplified, distorted and vibrational text, a rhythmic, vocalised and haptic [vocaptic] passage of reading both swarms and becomes space by way of immersion and ritualistic transmission.