Territories by Yvonne Salmon (m. 1992) and James Riley

 Territories collects a series of texts based on the collaborative, expanded cinema works of Yvonne Salmon and James Riley.

Their work involves a mixture of site-specific performance, spoken word and psychogeographic research. Using sound, projections and field recordings alongside carefully crafted texts, the aim, according to Salmon, “is to go some way towards conjuring the occulted references and erased citations that lie dormant in locations of personal and cultural significance.”

Working on the basis that space, place and architecture absorb, remix and transmit resonant signals, Salmon and Riley use their mixed-media events to tune into these cultural leys. Of particular interest are the border zones between fact and fiction: real locations referenced in fictional texts, favourite haunts of writers, spaces of superimposition. Conspiracy sites. Places that seem to invite acts of speculative mediumship.

“The walls are recorders”, writes Salmon, “Every action, thought and deed leaves a trace and writers have the ability to channel and to manipulate this residue.” But what happens when the writers disappear and their books are forgotten? What emerges when they are brought back from the dust? This is the zone explored in Territories. In the book Salmon and Riley draw deep on the idea of the séance as a creative tool. Part reading, part exploration; they attempt to dig into the foundations of a space to raise the voices of its ghosts.

https://www.contrabandbooks.co.uk/product/territories-yvonne-salmon-james-riley/

Yvonne Salmon is an artist, writer, filmmaker and academic. She is a lecturer at the University of Cambridge where she teaches across the faculties of Law, Land Economy, English and Art History. She directs the Alchemical Landscape project and is chair of the Cambridge University Counterculture Research Group. Yvonne writes on law, literature, visual culture, censorship, film, secret history and countercultural practice. Her work has been published by Getty Images, Cambridge University Press, Intersentia and the BFI, amongst others. Her study of sixties queer culture "Certain Circles" was published by Bloomsbury in The 1960s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction (Tew et al. (eds.), 2018).

James Riley is Fellow and College Lecturer in English at Girton College, University of Cambridge.