Settembre: A Writing Retreat for the Publisher – “Prendendo Tempo” in Southern Italy

Until the end of September, our director Anna-Sophie Springer, is out of the office for a writing retreat at the artist residency Museum of Loss and Renewal in Collemacchia. She’ll be back later in October but has sent a virtual postcard, in which she writes:

“Prendendo tempo in the hills along the borderlands between Lazio, Molise, and Abruzzo has offered a rare period of spaciousness—for reading, writing, and daydreaming in thought. While working on the proposal for my own academic monograph—which confronts difficult questions around ecological collapse, inherited violences of colonial extraction, and the limits of representation—I’ve also allowed myself the enjoyment of smaller, freer exercises, often sparked by the residency’s substantial art library (certainly including books like Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Luce Irigaray’s Sharing the World, and Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory). I’ve been swimming long-distance in the quarry lake whenever possible—so different from the always-too-soon walls of a pool—and more than once climbed a dry stone wall to lure three beautiful work horses with plantation apples, stroking their velvety ears while getting bitten by flies. One afternoon, lying on the edge of a ravine, I watched a line of rain clouds drift just above the hills. Inverting my perception, the sky became a sea—which, of course, it is. And when the mountain air turns sweet with ruderal figs claiming abandoned terraces, it’s easy to be flushed with a spectropoetic knowledge of being-within. I’m deeply grateful for this chance to slow down from what so often feels like unrelenting turmoil and acceleration. Drawing from Thomas Nail’s marine materialism, and John Akomfrah’s “submarine materialism” (in Vertigo Sea) these are oceanic feelings: of the heartmind needing to be “elsewhere”—not as a place, but a state; less an escape than a sustained attentiveness to the interconnections between spaces, scales, and durations.”