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WORDS MAISIE JANE DANIELS - IMAGERY COURTESY OF NOAH LEE SWANN
Starting out with a couple of people in their studio in Bethnal Green and at friends' houses, Noah Lee Swann began hosting collage nights, which soon became known as "Odradek." The name, taken from a Kafka short story about a peculiar patchwork creature made from remnants of rags and materials, perfectly symbolises collaging and bringing diverse elements together - whether that's the people or materials - to see what emerges. The gatherings quickly expanded, drawing many people together to create collages and evolving into events featuring guest talks by artists and educational readings.
Noah emphasises that art can be for everyone and that the act of creating can be as chaotic as it is curious. F Word wanted to learn more about the origins and thought process behind the Odradek collage nights, how to get involved, and Swann's latest endeavour, Odradek Fragments..
Maisie Daniels: Noah, welcome to F Word magazine, and thank you for talking with me today! Can you talk our readership through the Odradek collage nights and what they entail?
Noah Swan: Thank you so much! It’s an art event that happens once a month. It started at a studio in Bethnal Green and even at friends' houses, but more recently it’s been at a warehouse in Hackney Wick. It involves people coming together and making collages. Then, several months ago, we've included an artist’s talk. So, one artist will have a conversation with me, and I will ask them questions to showcase their work but also to explore their practice through a ‘collage lens’ you could say. The aim is really to get people to think about collage differently, and to cultivate a kind of common sensibility around this.
MD: How did the idea for the collage nights come about?
NS: It started with my studies. It began in Belfast; I was studying poetry and became very interested in French avant-garde and experimental poetry. I did my dissertation on a poet called John Ashbery, who was part of an avant garde group of writers and artists in the 1950s and '60s called The New York School. Especially in his early work when he was developing his voice, he was very influenced by collage, Dada, and the French surrealists. I felt a great affinity with Ashbery. And like Ashbery – generally speaking - I prefer artists to writers; I get along with them more easily for some reason, and find their work less prescriptive or rhetorical.
So it came from this almost research perspective; I started researching collage in a practical way too as a kind of alternative to ‘writing proper’. When I moved to London I was making collages in my room on the floor because I didn’t have any furniture or space. I had been moving around for more than a year and when I finally settled in London I lived with all my stuff in cardboard boxes, and all these bits of paper on the floor; it felt like my life was a kind of collage. So it became something personal. Friends would come over, and I would ask them to sit down. Just me and one or two friends, and we would do it together and just talk, have tea or drink wine and that naturally it grew into a monthly event.
"The aim is really to get people to think about collage differently, and to cultivate a kind of common sensibility around this."
MD: At what point did it click, and you realised you wanted to transform it into more of an event? Was there a "penny drop" moment, or was it purely organic?
NS: Maybe a bit of both, but it was organic. But I know from quite early on I wanted to regularise it. I have been putting on events, gigs, club nights, since I was sixteen years old so it comes quite naturally to me. And I was maybe interested in an event or happening as a kind of form in itself: Andy Warhol’s Factory has always been an inspiration and Allan Kaprow’s ‘happenings’ of the '50s. An event can be art in itself. It’s just a form, like the sonnet is a regularised form inside of which a language event takes place. I liked how poetic forms like this are almost like formulas or machines: you put in the words and they come out in a particular way - so doing one thing every month, twelve events a year, lets say, well you know that isn’t too far removed from the writing a sonnet. It’s something automatic, like a collage machine: it just produces every month… I like that regularity or formal approach. I really do see the actual event itself as a collage in itself - every person is sort of stuck together in a room and what ‘happens’, the event, is the collage: all art is a situation like this. When you look at a painting, its a series of events that occur on a canvas. So you do it once, and that’s an experiment, but if you formalise it and make it into a recurring thing, it becomes something that at least in appearance, comes alive. You can really see a difference in the collage nights when they are done regularly, it turns into a scene.
MD: Why did you feel the name Odradek was fitting?
NS: It comes from a Kafka short story, and the English translation of the story is “The Cares of a Family Man.” It’s one page long, a very short story that I read a long time ago during my undergrad. It’s about a creature called Odradek, and nobody knows who this creature is. Odradek is described as a spool, with bits of thread wrapped around, and it has a crossbar so that manages to stand up. It’s remnants of rags and materials stuck together, but it can walk and even talk. Its laughter sounds like the rustling of leaves. The narrator ends by saying he knows this Odradek, this creature, will survive him, and he finds that painful. It’s going to survive him and his children. It’s a strange story, but it’s a creature made up of parts, bits, and bobs. Psychoanalysts have theories about it, famous philosophers and critics too, but the story remains elusive - a bit like the actual creature Odradek who is impossible to grab hold of - the story remains out of our grasp it’s, like most of Kafka’s work, very mystifying.
Essentially, what I liked about the story was creating this living thing, almost organic, from inanimate pieces, bits and bobs. That’s what Odradek collage nights are too: by the end of the night we have a wall of collages that everyone’s made, and of course, these are not ‘living’ things, they are pieces of paper on a wall, but there’s something about the performance of this whole night that make them seem alive when seen together like this. A collage is like this: you cut up bits and pieces, remnants of images and text and you make a new artwork that has, in some sense some of you in it. It is almost alive. It has the appearance of something almost living, and that’s what fascinated me about the name. It’s not a fixed meaning; it informs everything and morphs with whatever Odradek becomes.
"A collage is like this: you cut up bits and pieces, remnants of images and text and you make a new artwork that has, in some sense some of you in it."
MD: Having been to a couple of these nights, what I love most is the sense of connection, and creativity combined. You go, and you have fun, and there’s no pressure.
NS: That’s great to hear. That’s another thing about Odradek the creature: it’s not good or bad. In some sense, there’s something uncomfortable about Odradek (the creature in Kafka’s story), but in many ways, it’s not a good piece of art, even the writing’s not very good… you don’t know if it’s good or not. There’s something about collage as an art form that I’ve always liked; generally, people within the art world, galleries, curators, collected find collages uncomfortable or difficult to handle because they aren’t really serious or something. They’re not sure about them because they challenge the idea of good or bad art and they challenge the idea of authenticity and originality. Collages suggest there’s no such thing as good or bad art; an art work is just an almost-creature, and it exists in its parts. Anybody can make them; that is the underlying aspect: everybody is an artist. Everybody can be an artist and, not just that, a good artist.
MD: Also, there’s the sense of community when creating. Do you think more people (particularly the younger generation) are wanting to do more wholesome activities such as collage nights?
NS: Yeah… I do wonder about that. I am skeptical about whether making art is a wholesome activity. I think it definitely can be, but I also think that making art isn’t a cute thing, it can be out of control and chaotic. As I said, it’s a living thing, and in the same way that a human is not just ‘wholesome’, well, neither is making art.
"Everybody can be an artist and, not just that, a good artist."
MD: Each night has its own theme - how do you go about choosing this?
NS: I always try to think of a word that stands for some aspect of collage, of what a collage is. because ultimately what I’m attempting is a collective kind of research into collage: what is a collage and what are the criteria for a collage? Something that has become a joke for us, or slogan for the events is: “everything is collage,” which is so meaningless in itself, but in a sense, it’s true. Everything is made up of parts, which is a constructivist way of thinking. For example, the finger is collaged to the hand, the hand to the wrist, the wrist to the arm etc. Even our identity; cells, even our genes… we are collage.
So every one of the themes has to do with exploring a certain aspect of collage. One month was ‘cut’, another was ‘trace’, ‘object’, ‘ruin’, ‘body’. All of these can be an opportunity for an epistemology of the collage, to build a knowledge of it. For ‘body’ we spoke about how a collage makes up a new body from assembled bodies: Frankenstein’s monster is a great example of a collage, but there are different kinds of bodies: a body of text, a body politic, a human body, a social body or a body of work - in other words an art work as a kind of body.
MD: Yes, the talks you give on the nights are very educational, and it does bring you to think more abstractly than you might normally. And seeing everybody else’s interpretations, that’s collage…
NS: Yes, it is. And it is an experience of London. I don’t think I would have done this anywhere else because this is one of the oldest cities in the world: time is collage to me, history is collage, and also on top of that, every person that you meet can be thought of as torn or fragmented from their context. London belongs to nobody or it belongs to everybody. Everyone is from somewhere else. Even those who are born in London will have completely different Londons that they know. It is too massive, too old and too complex to have a knowledge of the whole city. Each person is out of their context, and you speak to them, and it can suddenly open up a whole world. Each person you speak to gives you a whole different London. So in a way, this makes everyone’s insight into the city valuable and unique. Everyone is, in a sense, torn out of their context here and glued together with other contexts as though we were form different books and magazines on one piece of paper. Like London, collage, and Odradek, is open to everyone, you don’t need to have spent years training, there is no requirements or education you have to have: collage is like London, anyone can make it their own.
"London belongs to nobody or it belongs to everybody."
MD: Do you see Odradek expanding and if so, how?
NS: More recently I’ve started this literary publication, which is called Odradek fragments and it’s almost the writing or literary equivalent to the visual art side. If the collage night says “everybody can be an artist,” then the publication is trying to say that “everybody can be a writer.” And it handles writing in the same way. There’s a beautiful Margaret Atwood poem where she’s talking about a child, and she says: “the word hand floats above your hand.” And, in a way, everything has a word hovering above it, and we only need to be able to read these words and write them down and it’s a very easy thing to do. I think there’s a lot of gatekeeping around art and writing, but we can all do these things.
MD: True, because it can be a bit intimidating, and we are often so self-deprecating. It’s nice to break down the stigmas.
NS: Yeah, and I think silliness is a hugely important part of becoming confident. I know we’ve been talking very seriously about everything just now, but that’s why my friend Rachel, for example, is so important for the collage nights; you really feel her absence when she doesn’t come because she has a lightness of touch. She’s a hilarious person, and she treats everything with that lightness, sometimes she doesn’t even get round to making a collage she just has this sensibility. People feel comfortable to play when they see others playing. But play, as we know, is the first act of knowledge. All of our knowledge comes from play when we’re children.
"People feel comfortable to play when they see others playing."
MD: How does “Odradek Fragments” work; can people submit, or will it be a night like Odradek collage nights?
NS: I think it’s a bit of both. I mentioned earlier that I liked formal restrictions and Odradek fragments is a kind of half-hearted publication in a sense. It is primarily on Instagram, and it uses the Instagram form of the ten slides as a kind of form. So you have ten slides to say something basically, which works out to about a thousand words of prose. For poetry it’s less. Every two months or so there is a physically published review of the work featured on the Instagram page. Odradek fragments [is] really the voice or megaphone of the collage group. Anyone can submit work, we post a piece of writing once a week. If anyone is interested in submitting work I’d recommend having a look and reading the manifesto there and some of the pieces: we already have some really amazing contributors. I am assembling the first ‘Review’ at the moment and this will be out at the end of July in the form of a pamphlet.
MD: Anyone can submit?
NS: Anyone can submit to that! And I encourage everyone to!
MD: Are there themes for this?
NS: No, no themes. it’s quite open in a sense. The theme, I guess, would be collage, but in a very broad sense. Everything I have said about Odradek you can apply here. I’m interested in experimental writing, and writing that doesn’t really ‘fit in’ to the usual literary journal. I have quite a few brilliant friends where nobody has taken the time to publish them, or nobody’s interested or perhaps they don’t even think of themselves as writers. You have to jump through a lot of hoops, and I got fed up with the publishing world. With how poetry and fiction in particular are published, how journals work, and I feel that it’s outdated and elitist.
MD: It really is…
NS: And nobody feels or thinks that anybody can write poetry. They think it is a really specific thing that you need to learn how to do, but you don’t.
MD: Will you be continuing the collage nights?
NS: Yeah, once I’ve got the first issue of the publication, then I will use the collage night to kind of propagate [laughs]. This is planned for the 24th of July.
"nobody feels or thinks that anybody can write poetry. They think it is a really specific thing that you need to learn how to do, but you don’t."
MD: Lovely, again it’s back to the organic growth, and it must be so nice to see it expanding.
NS: Yeah, and it’s just going with as much as I can handle, as I do have a day job…
MD: Does it still feel exciting?
NS: Yeah! It’s the only thing that keeps me going, really, that and my own writing, and I’d much rather do it full-time.
MD: What’s the most rewarding part of all of this?
NS: I think the most rewarding part is (this sounds so cliché) when people get proud of their work, or they feel confidence to make art or write, where before they never thought they could. My sister is a painter; she’s not a writer, but she reads a lot, and she’s a really good reader. She doesn’t think of herself like that though. I really believe that reading is a kind of writing. I’ve been speaking about the idea of the publication with her and reading her various contributions as I am editing them, and one evening I was reading her a contribution by Jess Capstick-Dale and she said to me, “that makes me want to write.” I know it’s from feeling encouraged, and seeing others do it.
MD: What do you hope people take away from the nights? Can you describe it in three words?
NS: Scissors, paper, and glue.
BOTH: [laughs].
"I think the most rewarding part is when people feel confidence to make art or write, where before they never thought they could."
MD: At the last collage night, you had artist Esmé Naylor Farrelly come for the talk. Would you like to continue bringing in this element?
NS: Yeah! In fact, that discussion will be in our first issue. And I do hope that one day when perhaps I have more time, I’d like to turn the artist talks into its own podcast or something. But a lot of these things need a lot of resources, which I don’t have at the moment. But as long as people keep asking for the collage nights I will do them…
MD: Give the people what they want!
NS: And I do think they will grow. I want as many people to come now as possible, and I will still keep doing smaller informal events so that there is still community and intimacy, but ultimately, I do want it to grow into something outside of my intentions.
MD: Where can we follow, and how can we keep up to date on these nights?
NS: for collage nights follow @odradek_collage and for the publication side of things: @odradek_fragments
MD: And to end, what’s your favourite "F" word?
NS: Fabulous.
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