A collective performance sounding the last words of the discarded library books at Brynmor Jones Library, initiated and held by Katherine Smith in collaboration with Lucia Crowther and staff at Brynmor Jones Library.
We will be gathering at the library in Skills Room 2 at 5pm where we will have a brief space for practising sound-making using voice, breath and word. We will then walk slowly for around 20-30 minutes while sounding the last words in different ways through indoor and outdoor spaces connected to the library. The performance will finish by 5.45pm. You are welcome to join us afterwards in the library cafe to relax and reflect after the performance. This is one of a series of Last Words performances over 2025-2026, all held in different libraries. The performance will be audio-recorded and a small part of it joined with recordings of the other performances, to sound the last words more widely.
“In my everyday work in public libraries, I see that library books ‘die’ – are taken off shelves – to make space for new books, so that the shelves can ‘breathe’ (metaphor from a conversation with Alison Clarke, library officer, January 2025).
There are many criteria used to determine this. For example, they could be duplicates; in bad condition; outdated in terms of their content according to different parameters. In this project, I am most interested in this last reason for taking a book off the shelf – that a book’s content is outdated – even though library workers are very cautious about removing books in this way from what I’ve seen. And these books anyway will likely be sold on by the library and exist in many other libraries still, definitely in the British Library if published in the UK and Ireland. But this does mark a moment of transition that feels important: from within the circulation of that particular library – with the status and belonging of being part of that library’s collection, a shared resource that we agree is valuable for a public to read for free – to being released from that library.
So, if we see these books as symbols/metaphors of systems/knowledges/ways of being that we no longer need, how can we mark this transition for these books? What sorts of events or rituals or moments could give these books a good death – composting their knowledges/practices/ways of being and putting them to rest, so that they don’t reemerge? And what else might emerge from this space? How can we expand/stretch/play with the potential of words, the meanings we can receive from those books? How can words disintegrate and come together again in an embodied way as something different?
The Last Words (2025-2026) is a series of collective performances/grief rituals/joy rituals/spoken word works/breath exercises/something else each time, working through these questions.”
Book a place here: https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/wpcrc/last-words/e-pbdpgk
The work is the bringing together of many current alive threads and spaces that inspire and nourish my practices: Aurora Levins Morales on storytelling, grief, medicine in polycrisis | everyday library work and libraries as potential spaces of shared embodied connection | The Manifesto Project at Morden Library and the collaboration with Ambrine Boukhalfa | people at end-of-life who have accompanied me – breathed with me – as I’ve accompanied them, breathed with them | the death and joy work in the poetry of Andrea Gibson | holding space for regular collective cooking in Mitcham Orchard | Tehching Hsieh talking to me about body rhythm | breathing together in spaces of protest, kinship, solidarity | Lama Rod Owens on rage, love, broken-heartedness | regular work with children and young people who don’t use words in many settings | Monday Manifesto Club at Morden Library | queer song circles inspired by Aaron Johnson and Ary Solomon, held by eve, singing in the dark, vocalising breath | Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s book Hospicing Modernity | the death work of Shivani Narang, Narinder Bazen, Murphy Robinson, Jamie Waggoner | the gap between breaths, the space where one day I will likely stop breathing | the performance series 2024-2025 in the gap, are we there | Street Soundsystem’s sonic interventions | The Sonic Art Research Unit and Patrick Farmer’s On Vibration | Cloud Work and Lost in the Maze: films I made with young people in 2023 and 2024 focused on interconnectedness and entanglement and togetherness.
For more information, see: www.katherinesmithart.co.uk/last-words
Written by Katherine Smith.