Residency: Literary Pilgrimage as a creative practice – following Sylvia Plath, who followed Yeats

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This project, supported by Culture Moves Europe, will retrace Sylvia Plath’s literary pilgrimage to W. B. Yeats’s Ireland in 1962 — a journey she undertook just before her death, visiting the very sites that had shaped the poet she most admired. Like a kind of Savage Detectives (Roberto Bolaño) mapped onto Irish geography, where the heroes are poets following the traces of lost poets, the team will follow her journey six decades later to discover, get lost and create.

The project is directed by Ginebra Raventós, poet, sound artist, and filmmaker, and carried out together with sound and visual artist Joan Lavandeira, sound artist and acoustic engineer Emilio Marx, and exhibition organizer Anna Penalva Halpin. Ginebra, Joan, and Emilio are members of The Acoustic Heritage Collective, a Barcelona-based company specialising in expanded literature and sound heritage. The four will travel together to Ireland, combining their practices across poetic direction, sound, image, and curatorial thinking.

At the heart of the project is a practice of expanded literature: poetry that moves beyond the printed page into sound, immersive formats, and cinematic poems. The Acoustic Heritage Collective brings to this work a track record of audiovisual immersive pieces built around literary pilgrimage as creative method, most notably Journey to the Center of the Earth (Iceland), which retraced Jules Verne’s characters from Reykjavík to the Snæfellsjökull volcano, and Narrow Backroads (Japan), which followed Matsuo Bashō’s Oku no Hosomichi through northern Japan, each resulting in an immersive 360° cinematic poem. This Irish chapter draws on that experience while opening an entirely new creative territory.

The team will travel with high-tech field recording equipment (360° microphones and cameras, hydrophones, and 3D scanning tools) building a transmedia logbook where writing, sound, and image are generated through deep immersion in place. From 23 – 25 May the team will be based in The Studio at Thoor Ballylee.

Thoor Ballylee will be a site of particular significance, both as a key moment in Plath’s own Yeats pilgrimage and as a space for encounter with scholars, poets, and cultural agents whose work illuminates the worlds of both writers.

From this living archive, the team will develop a new immersive audiovisual installation: a cinematic poem that reclaims literature beyond the page and invites audiences into the layered sonic and poetic memory of a landscape.

The residency is made possible with the generous support of Culture Moves Europe and the Yeats Thoor Ballylee Society.

Further information:

https://acousticheritagecollective.org/narrowbackroads/

https://patrimoniacustic.cat/journey/home.html

https://acousticheritagecollective.org/

https://linktr.ee/Ginebraraventos