What's On: Nature Unwrapped, Kings Place, London

Chris Watson, recording Orcas, Ross Sea, Antarctica (c) Jason Roberts

By Sara Bellini

This month, London’s own King’s Place launched Nature Unwrapped, twelve months of events revolving around the topic of nature and our interaction with it. The first evening saw artist-in-residence Chris Watson and activist George Monbiot comparing the soundscapes of healthy and suffering ecosystems, featuring music by Ewan McLennan.

The programme encompasses contemporary, classical and folk music, as well as storytelling, screenings and illustrated talks. Some musicians previously featured on Elsewhere will be there, namely Cosmo Sheldrake in February as well as Kitty Macfarlane during the Wild Singing weekend in March, in collaboration with the podcast Folk on Foot. A few events are already sold out, so you might want to book your tickets soon!

King’s Place is a multi-arts venue in King’s Cross dedicated to music, comedy and talks. They host various festivals, such as the London Podcast Festival and The Politics Festival, and their year-long flagship series Unwrapped, which last year was dedicated to women and music.

Website

Borders and their consequences: Introducing 'the corridor'

Image: Vera Drebusch

The Corridor is a new project from Ireland exploring borders and their consequences. One of the founders of the project is the Elsewhere Books Editor Marcel Krueger, who we asked to introduce the project and the first events and actions that will be taking place in the coming months:

Who needs borders anyway?

For a year now, my wife Anne and I live in Dundalk in Ireland. We moved here for a variety of reasons: to live and work in a smaller town away from the molochs of Berlin and Dublin (where renting out has become impossible anyway), to live by the sea, to be close to my office. We knew that we would be moving next to one of the main Brexit-faultlines, the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. The longer we live here, the more we've become fascinated with the history of our new hometown and worried about what the future might hold for the communities north and south of the border. As a writer & journalist and a curator & arts manager coming from a country which was defined by a border for several decades, we now want to explore the area through both our fields of expertise, and have created 'the corridor'.    

'the corridor' is an interdisciplinary and discursive project that which explores borders and their political, social and cultural consequences through a series of public talks, screenings and exhibitions. With artists from all fields, historians, sociologists, contemporary witnesses and other experts we want to discuss the history of the Irish border and the future challenges of the upcoming EU border for this area. Our first event series is a collaboration with the 1. Deutsches Stromorchester (1st German Electrophonic Orchestra), and you can find more details on our website. Coming events will include a fish dinner with fishermen from both sides of the border initiated by German artist Vera Drebusch, and an exchange about walking borders between Elsewhere editor-in-chief Paul Scraton and Irish writers Garett Carr and Evelyn Conlon. 

To paraphrase Jan Morris, if race is a fraud, then nationality is a cruel pretense. There is nothing organic to it. As the tangled history of the corridor between Belfast and Dublin shows, it is disposable. You can find your nationality altered for you, overnight, by statesmen far away. So who needs borders anyway?