The Reservoir

Angus Carlyle’s notepad for the “Arctic Auditories” research project


  • by acarlyle1968
    Elin Anna Labba’s The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow can be heard to reverberate with some of the places and people who dwell in Linnea Axelsson’s Ædnan (and resonate, too, of course, with what has been sounded out in earlier […]
  • by acarlyle1968
    The title of Linnea Axelsson’s 2018 poem – Ædnan – derives from an old Northern Sámi word whose meaning lies somewhere between “the land,” “the ground,” and “the earth.” The title is shared by the name of the […]
  • by acarlyle1968
    First published in German in 1938 and first translated into English in 1954, Christiane Ritter’s A Woman in the Polar Night recounts the painter’s experiences in Svalbard / Spitsbergen, centring on several seasons in the hut built by […]
  • by acarlyle1968
    Himali Singh Soin’s We Are Opposite Like That is a stunning five year cycle of “interdisciplinary works that that comprises mythologies for the poles, told from the non-human perspective of an elder that has witnessed deep time: the […]
  • by acarlyle1968
    Earlier posts have referred to the sound of the aurora borealis: the review of Ann-Helén Laestadius “Stolen”, a diaristic account of borealis hunting with Britta and a report from the deck of the French ship La […]
  • by acarlyle1968
    Recovering from a snakebite, the sixteen year old Togolese Tété-Michel Kpomassie discovers Robert Gessain’s book The Eskimos from Greenland to Alaska lying face up on a shelf of an evangelical bookstore in Lomé: “was it the author’s praise […]
  • by acarlyle1968
    It has taken me, I realised as I sat down at my computer, almost a year to get round to writing this. 320 days have passed since I visited the Venice Biennale with the express intention […]
  • by acarlyle1968
    To the John Marchant Gallery in town to see Grace Ndiritu’s “Pole to Pole,” screened as part of the “Light Years Ahead” exhibition curated by Alison McKenna. The film by the Kenya-British artist presents two kinds […]
  • by acarlyle1968
    Liberating Sápmi is Gabriel Kuhn’s 2020 collection of 12 interviews with activists, scholars and artists who have been chosen for their contributions to a theme announced in the book’s subtitle: “Indigenous Resistance in Europe’s Far North”. The […]
  • by acarlyle1968
    “Underfoot” can be read as a single poem that tracks its way across a whole book. Its verses appear as clusters of lines that are pressed together towards the foot of the publication, occasionally joined by […]