Kai Fierle Hedrick
 

Born Toronto, Canada. A mixed-media writer whose research interests circle around collaborative, community-engaged practices. Kai holds an MPhil in Architecture and the Moving Image from Cambridge University [UK] -- and has worked as a Project-Assistant for the interdisciplinary consultancy General Public Agency, spent two years developing and facilitating cross-disciplinary writing workshops for the East-Side Educational Trust, and from 2006 to 2007 also taught as a visiting lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London. She now currently lives and works in New York City as a Program Manager at the non-profit Free Arts NYC, and is the Managing Editor of How2. Contact: www.orium.org.
Motion Study 1 Motion Study 2 Motion Study 3

Recordings

The following recording was made at the Contemporary Experimental Women's Poetry festival, held 6-8 October 2006 in Cambridge, UK and organised by Emily Critchley with help from Catherine Brown.

 

Bibliography

CHAPBOOKS

  • 2008: Spell/ing ( ) Bound; wee-chap written collaboratively with Kathrin Schaeppi & Cara Benson, to be published by Dusie Press [Switzerland].
  • 2007: Pantoume; a hypertext/poetic essay with collage illustrations by Marianne Morris, published in the summer 2007 issue of How2 as well as at www.orium.org [London, UK].
  • 2006: Motion Study [Bad Press; London, UK].
  • 2005: String Theories [Bad Press; London, UK].

EXHIBITIONS/PERFORMANCES

  • May 2006: Read poems, from London, as part of a web-linked performance -- also including live music & video projection -- hosted by O3ONE gallery in Belgrade, Serbia [London/Prague/Berlin/Belgrade].
  • 20 May 2005: Six short pieces for piano after 'String Theories' by Kai Fierle-Hedrick; musical/poetic collaboration with composer Panayiotis Demopoulos, premiered by concert pianist Sara Nicolls during a performance at the University of York [UK].
  • July 2004: A portrait of the site as time; essay designed for 3 data projectors and 6 speakers, exhibited in the Cambridge University Department of Architecture [UK].
  • 2001- 2002: Compositions 1; photo-poetic installation produced with Echophilia collective in Lotus Eaters [Dec 2001] and ArteVista [Jan 2002] galleries [Montreal, Canada].

INTERVIEWS/REVIEWS

  • 2007: Review of Fig by Caroline Bergvall; published in the spring issue of Chicago Review.
  • 2006: 'Lifted, in interview with Lisa Robertson'; in the spring issue of Chicago Review.

JOURNAL PUBLICATIONS

  • The Antigonish Review, Room of One's Own, Montage, Montage 2001 Poetry Supplement, The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, The Journal of Miscellaneous Reviews, One, Compositions 1, Scrivener, Echolocation, Pages, Skald, HOW2, Openned, Pilot -- plus translations of selected poems (from the sequence that would become the chapbook Motion Study) were published in the Serbian journal Treci Trg.

OTHER

  • 2007: The Publishing Game, a cd-rom documenting a set of Year 12/13 students from City of London Academy as they produced their own magazine "for youth, by youth", supported by the National Magazine Company, London College of Communication, Arts Council England & the East-Side Educational Trust [London, UK].
  • 2006: Stories Everywhere!, a cd-rom documenting the Stories Everywhere! site-specific writing project in Hermitage Primary School, supported by the East-Side Educational Trust and Creative Partnerships East [London; UK]

Sample text

See Still 7 and Still 21 from Motion Study.

 

Postscript, Cafe Ouky Douky

Manipulation in particular seems to play a significant role as a strategy of dealing with the world and assumed reality. [...] Manipulations and deceptions become guidelines in a pursuit of communication and a proper place -- but first of all -- they are instruments to investigate never-too-near-approached phenomenon of truth.
* Adam Budnek, for the 2005 International Biennale of Contemporary Art in Prague

 

the contemporary interior here short-circuits
alienation | sums Prague as this woman or
that woman browsing packaged hours | i.e., tram times
to plot arrivals | how this man quotes tourism
as asymmetric opportunity | their lives in ochre
chapped by the same, pale city | or costume
change | a time of day, say 6pm, undressing
its turnover with the command to ponder
regularlity | substance some moving thing 
or metronome | their conversation, rhythm poaching
the page | like other countries, interrupting
as spectacle made norm by the universal
of cafe culture | junctured, caffeinated, common
grounds, the rhythm of human digits drilling
and dwelling | swigging, twiddling their high-
strung ways as a taut boredom | the preferred
mantra an elastic gainsaying i.e., how she overhears
'I was just traipsin' streets when...' and waxes
meaningful | falls prey to another sham
mayhem as stained glass lamps bearing fruit
indeed might break| her foreign prerogative
to evade even cross-cultural ruts by any
means | the vital act to fictionalise the local
as events | let loose the abstract, fatten
narrative, exaggerate, befuddle, fuck up
the line | we love this, she and I, for its schizophrenic
stealth | we, double-time, risk ethics through
meddling | spurn talk as ornament and aim
for the blunt and dusted buildings, their striations
and back-lighting | by proxy mark observation as a misfit
stalker | interlopers as postcards by Durex quoting
condoms as flying saucers| the clatter of wind-chimes
of panes of glass | reflective | proving our patronage
or my tiger of a t-shirt and foreign cheek bones
bunk presence as witness | a sigh of bloody
eureka and scribbling nicks the place

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