clocks replaced with : ; . [Deschooling Time in the Small Isles]

In July 2023, the poet and editor Kate Simpson visited the Scottish Small Isles, geologically complex landscapes featuring samples from the Archean (Lewisian gneiss basements formed approximately three billion years ago), Proterozoic (Torridonian sandstone formed approximately one billion years ago), Mesozoic (sedimentation deposited approximately 200 million years ago, and Palaeocene (basalt formed approximately 55.8 million years ago as part of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum event). Writing in-situ, she documented her experiences interacting, writing, and thinking with the remnants of multiple eras, her notion of temporality being “deschooled” and destabilised by lithic time. In this seminar, framed as performance, she will share the results of her exploratory practice, reading from a text that has been consciously “made of time”, blending the domains of past, present, and future, in both form and content.