In my work in public libraries as a library worker (Dec 2024-March 2026) and artist (2024), I have seen that library books ‘die’ – are taken off shelves – to make space for new books, so that the shelves can ‘breathe’. 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 For example, they could be duplicates; in bad condition; outdated in terms of their content according to different parameters. In this project, I am most interested in this last reason for taking a book off the shelf – that a book’s content is outdated – even though library workers are very cautious about removing books in this way from what I’ve seen.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 they don’t reemerge? And what else might come from this space? How can we expand/stretch/play with the potential of words, the meanings that we can receive from these books? How can words disintegrate and come together again in an embodied way as something different? The last words (2025 onwards) is a series of collective performances/grief rituals/joy rituals/spoken word works/breath exercises/something else each time, working through these questions.

https://libraryblog.wordpress.hull.ac.uk/2025/12/19/last-words-2/ Brynmor Jones Library, Hull University, January 2026

The work is the bringing together of many current alive threads and spaces that inspire and nourish my practices: regular work with children and young people who don’t use words in many settings | Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s book Hospicing Modernity | Aurora Levins Morales on storytelling, grief, medicine in polycrisis | everyday library work and libraries as potential spaces of connection and togethering | The Manifesto Project at Morden Library and the collaboration with Ambrine Boukhalfa | 1-1 mentoring using sound, breath, talking with neurodivergent university students | practices at Mitcham Orchard 2023-2025 | studying Community Orcharding | 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 | The Community Apothecary and their seed-to-salve medicine | Tehching Hsieh talking to me about body rhythm | breathing together in spaces of protest, kinship, solidarity, love | Lama Rod Owens on rage, love, broken-heartedness and connecting to land in all its depths | queer song circles inspired by Aaron Johnson and Ary Solomon, held by eve, singing in the dark, vocalising breath | the weaver work of Murphy Robinson and Jamie Waggoner | the gap between breaths, the space where one day I will likely stop breathing | the performance series in the gap, are we there, and the collaboration with Lucia Crowther for Hospice Architecture and Design | Street Soundsystem’s sonic interventions | The Sonic Art Research Unit and Patrick Farmer’s Row of Trees | Cloud Work and Lost in the Maze: films I made with young people in 2023 and 2024 focused on interconnectedness and entanglement