UCL Special Collections and Monitor Books present Slowly, slowly, the tongue unrolls: an evening of poetry and sound bringing together some of the most interesting experimental poets and artists at work today.

Doors 6:30pm
Tickets Free: RSVP

UCL Special Collections and Monitor Books present Slowly, slowly, the tongue unrolls: an evening of poetry and sound bringing together some of the most interesting experimental poets and artists at work today. Inspired by UCL’s internationally renowned Small Press Collections of independently produced literary little magazines, experimental art and poetry, this event will feature performance poetry, sound art and screenings to celebrate 60 years of small press collecting at UCL. It also concludes two projects rooted in these collections: Monitor Books’ tenure as the inaugural UCL 2025 Small Press in Residence, and Andrew Whiteman’s 2025 Liberating the Collections Visiting Fellowship focusing on rare sound poetry recordings.

Join us for performances by veteran poet Allen Fisher, renowned contemporary artist Tris Vonna-Michell, NTS Radio favourites DJ duo Time Is Away, Andrew Whiteman’s new sonic poetry project Poets Workout Sound System, experimental choir Vocal Constructivists, UCL’s own artist-poet dove / Christine Kirubi, artist-writer Samra Mayanja and performer-director Rowland Hill.

Performers:

Rowland Hill
Allen Fisher
Vocal Constructivists
Samra Mayanja
Tris Vonna Michell
dove / Christine Kirubi
Time Is Away
Andrew Whiteman / Poets Workout Sound System

Poet, painter, and art historian Allen Fisher has over 160 single-author publications, most recently Migraine Conference (from Aquifer books) and two artist’s books Black Pond (2020) and proceeds in the garden, after Dante’s Paradiso (2022). Fisher worked in the City Lead Works from 1962 until the ’70s, performed with Fluxus in Britain in the ’70s, and studied physics, human physiology, drawing and color, and art history at Goldsmiths and Essex. He is Emeritus Professor of Poetry and Art at Manchester Metropolitan University and editor of the journal Spanner and Spanner Editions and co-publisher of Aloes Books, New London Pride, and Edible Magazine.

dove / Christine Kirubi is an artist-poet based in London. She is the author of WILDPLASSEN published by the87press and Partures.

Poets Workout Soundsystem is an experimental sonic poetry and music project created by Canadian musician, artist and scholar Andrew Whiteman (co-founder of Siren Recordings and member of Broken Social Scene), who was the 2025 Liberating the Collections Visiting Fellow at UCL.

Hailing from Montreal and Toronto, PWSS is Andrew Whiteman and Adrienne Amato - two longtime friends pushing each other’s buttons onstage under the sign of high NRG beats, psychedelic visuals, and radical liberatory poetics. Modelled after the neo-pull-up-your-sox wierdness of the Jane Fonda era, PWSS offers Poetry, dressed in fresh track suits and accompanied by fast BPM tempos as a possible mode of resistance to capitalism. They seek to engage the excitement and free movement of bodies together, tapping into a collective image of Keith Haring cartoons come alive. At The Horse Hospital, PWSS will be offering dusty pearls of late 70s cassette sound poetry dislodged from the UCL Small Press Collections that have been re-appropriated & put to magical purpose. The Bermuda Triangle of London (Balsam Flex), Italy (Baobab), and Baltimore (Widemouth) join withered hands and spell cast through the medium of PWSS.

Rowland Hill
I am an artist based in Stockport. I create live events and installations that sit somewhere between object, environment and performance. Using stagecraft, special effects, video, sound and choreography, my work plays with the tensions inherent to performance and theatricality such as suspense and revelation, illusion and exposure, control and vulnerability, reality and simulation. I’m interested in unpicking the conventions of how we are ‘entertained’, the performance of self and of femininity, personal/collective identity, and the divisions between stage and life, often arriving at indeterminate or ambivalent states.

I am also a performer/director and enjoy interpreting the work of other artists across a variety of disciplines. I recently co-directed a production of Samuel Beckett’s Quad I + II with Jack Sheen for Refracted Sound, an event at the Southbank Centre produced by the London Sinfonietta. I have performed UK premieres of work by Yvonne Rainer and Vito Acconci, at venues such as Tate Britain, London Contemporary Music Festival and Lowry (Salford).

Samra Mayanja
I’m an artist-writer based in London. I make films and performances that I describe as sexy-slapstick-gone-sour. It’s cute, a little gross with a side of sad-girl pop.

I write emotionally resonant dark comedy that speaks to the absurdity of life. For the last 6 years I’ve shown playful performance art and self-produced films at places like Somerset House, The Tetley, South London Gallery, Camden People's Theatre and Centre for Contemporary Art Glasgow.

Time is Away is the open-ended collaboration between artist Jack Rollo and cultural historian Elaine Tierney. Their work together encompasses radio, research, sound artworks and DJ sets/mixes. Since September 2013, they have been residents on NTS Radio where their monthly radio programme combines music, spoken word and field recordings to make something that is part soundscape, part essay for the radio.

Tris Vonna-Michell works in various media and is based in Stockholm. Recent works can be found in numerous public collections such as Serralves Museum, Porto, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Centre National Des Arts Plastique, Paris, Tate Modern, London, and Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg. Vonna-Michell's work utilises a plethora of technical approaches and modes of presentation, encompassing performance, slide projection, sound poetry, printed matter, photography and film.

The film, River Thames: Spooling & Splicing (2026), consists of spliced and scanned 35mm film strips. The still photography material belonged to Tris’ late father, E.E. Vonna-Michell (1950-2020). After disentangling, selecting and splicing into film spools a journey began to take shape, stretching from the mouth of the estuary into the heart of the River Thames. Tris collaborated with Laura Kahn Mitchison to create a collection of sound compositions based on photographic collages (scores) he sent her. The concept was that she would walk from Vauxhall to Bankside and beyond, producing field recordings while performing excerpts aloud from the collages. Within the first few minutes of her walk, commencing outside the MI6 headquarters, two policemen promptly derailed her planned journey. They were eager to know her intentions and which other protected sites she was going to loiter around. During post-production, while struggling to synchronise the sound to image, Tris imported the audio recording from this police interrogation. This brief encounter became a necessary inflection point, in setting the tone, and drawing the journey to a close.

Founded in 2011 by Jane Alden, the Vocal Constructivists specialise in the realisation and performance of text and graphic scores. The group has premiered over 25 commissions and offers radical new interpretations of established works. The first ensemble to give a sung performance of Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise (1964–67), the Vocal Constructivists have worked with a number of living composers — Mark Applebaum, Wojtek Blecharz, Anthony Braxton, Neely Bruce, Zeynep Bulut, Jan Duszyński, Carole Finer, Jin-Hi Kim, Ron Kuivila, Paula Matthusen, Meredith Monk, Pauline Oliveros, Michael Parsons, Tom Phillips, Lauren Redhead, Bogusław Schäffer, Margrit Schenker, Daniel J. Wolf, and Christian Wolff. Vivid concert presentations have led to invited performances at Café Oto, Peckham multi-storey car park, St John’s Smith Square, South London Gallery, the V22 Summer Club, and festivals in the UK, Ireland, and the US. Following a new staging of Tom Phillips’ 1969 opera Irma, the Vocal Constructivists were invited to the British Library’s Knowledge Centre to showcase the Scratch Orchestra’s contribution to the history of writing.