embodied semantics/epistemology
first person science
sign vs. gesture
unfix ready-made concepts
movement choir
multimodality
living assemblage(s)
emergent language(s)
expanded choreographies
polyphonic vocabulary creation
Adélia Santos Costa, Paulo Luís Almeida, Emílio Remelhe
language
re-enactment
writing
memorial
performance
<< Julia Calver
Writing and reading texts alone and with others, I work with word forms – morphologies – and with prosody. I re-distribute the morpheme ‘s’ as a means to destabilise the intonation of the sentence. Deviant morphological modifications for plurality and possession are made by the letter s, my companion, with apostrophe, in this work. Through practices of reading that focus on engaging an internal reading voice and listening to its sonic registration of altered sentences, a morphological poetics is developed.
Accidence (a word which my Oxford English Dictionary notes as ‘dated’) describes the ordinary functioning of inflectional morphology, or – the way word forms change according to their syntactic situation in systems including time, number and possession. In accidence, I hear a homophonic possibility of dissent from grammar (accidents); a possibility of movement opens up, in excess of irony, in a practice of listening. I begin to hear this dissent as incursions of other voices. These other, internal voices might change the cognitive path through the sentence.
Registering my s, shifts in intonation sometimes shift the grammatical subject from its place of syntactic stability to an unfixed position in the temporality of the sentence. Manipulated morphologies amount to a change in thinking that allows for grammatical functions to revise a sentence in progress.
When I try to recall the voice of a friend, someone who is not here with me, my memory doesn’t return a voice but small sounds. A friend’s characteristic expressions of sound are heard, but not continuous speech. Phrases are absent, but their forms of intonation can be accessed. Gradually, listening internally, it seems possible to describe the voice of a friend as only fragilely invested in the synching of sound and words.
Teasing the position of letter s from its surroundings, as I do in this writing, vowels stretch into the sonic spaces that are left. This is an indirect attempt at desynching sounds from words, or at making an analogue for a remembered voice. For there to be someone else here, I chafe orthography to get little bits of sound off: small phonemic bits. Really, this is where the friend lives.
CREDITS AND LINKS
1. The above is an extract from Friend’s Voice, writing used for a shared reading in the course of an afternoon workshop Vocal Recall, 13 July 2022, Sheffield Hallam Fine Art Project Space, S1 Artspace. The workshop included practices of remembering familiar voices and experimenting with their internal reconstruction. Using sonic slips we aimed to make spaces for other voices. The experience of listening for voices of friends was initially developed during 2021-22 with Deirdre Humphrys and is ongoing. Friend’s Voice is included in Vocal Recall: Reading for a Friend’s Voice a form of expanded documentation of the eponymous workshop published in MAP, in the series A Year of Carte Blanche & Other Chimeras, edited by Daniela Cascella, October 2022:
Accidence are in the sentence.
This piece for voice, and accompanying cracks and claps, works on accidence (inflectional morphology) as a grammatical encoding of its homophone ‘accidents’ and on accidents’ connoted violence.
CREDITS AND LINKS
1. Accidence was commissioned by Book Works for Without Reduction – a twelve-hour radio broadcast on Resonance Extra to mark the final issue of The Happy Hypocrite (2021). Accidence was subsequently broadcast by Radiophrenia (2022).
LINK TO - Accidence full version
(in part 2 Accidence starts at 38 mins, 15 seconds and lasts 5 mins, 35 seconds)
<< Kimberly Campanello
I write at the intersection of experimental/innovative poetry (visual poetry, asemic writing, performance) and the more standard landscape of the lyric. My work with language often explores the affects/effects of the poetic ‘I’, tracking its relationship to experience, subjectivity, and ethics, and utilising the power of pronouns and perspective.
I sift for and toss up this ‘I’ – this ‘enunciative apparatus’ that gives the effect of hearing a voice (Jonathan Culler).
I find poetry in the evidence, the testimony, the litanies, the echoes of other ‘I’s. I find it in the air, ‘indelibly stamped / on the atmosphere somewhere’ (H.D.).
I excavate language to identify the matter. The saint’s femur in the encrusted reliquary. The child’s insistent petrous bone, hard like stone, in the run-off at the bottom of the septic tank. The ankle notches a brain hinges movement upon.
I use tools I have (parataxis, juxtaposition, figuration, echo, and silence) and those I discover (Google alerts, Microsoft Word lay-out, hand tools to build a box to hold voices and names).
‘I is another’ (Rimbaud) after all, so let us ‘bring to a crisis his relation with language’ (Barthes).
The thing you said about what matter is important. Why shouldn’t I strip it back and boil it down. Tear the crust of bread.
Another way of saying it: she breaks open the ground to build you a word-home. I articulate the sound of bone.
Sometimes the ‘I’s’ congeal and atone. Sometimes the ‘I’ splits and leaks love.
MOTHERBABYHOME (2019) is a 796-page ‘report’ and durational performance. It is a ritual, an excavation of voices composed between 2014 and 2019 entirely from language drawn from historical archives and contemporary sources, including files given to me by local historian Catherine Corless and material sent to my Gmail account via Google Alerts (using ‘tuam’ and ‘mother and baby’).
I use techniques from visual and conceptual poetics (especially as regards scale and materials), including black-out and overwriting, as well as parataxis, sonic devices (including rhyme), juxtaposition, and repetition. I bring together disparate languages: 1) The language of those who would deem critique of the Church and its hand-in-glove relationship with the State as ‘Catholic-bashing’. 2) The language of science, law, journalism, and politics that intentionally or unreflectively undermines the significance of unmarked mass graves and of carceral practices directed at children and women. 3) The language of survivors who have experienced twin horrors – the first horror in the Home itself and the second horror in the language used to proscribe their autonomy and undermine their accounts of their own experiences.
MOTHERBABYHOME is a ritual of caring that bears repeating. I identify the wound and attempt to salve it. The wound is an entry and an exit. I must know its depth to treat it well, so I use the echo. I suture language to itself. I lift the connection points, the tiny throwaway words – articles, prepositions, conjunctions – and foreground them. I separate hinge from frame and free what needs freeing. Rushing through an open doorway at last creates a sound.
CREDITS AND LINKS
1. Kimberly Campanello, MOTHERBABYHOME poetry-object (Manchester: zimZalla, 2019)
2. Kimberly Campanello, MOTHERBABYHOME poetry-object (Manchester: zimZalla, 2019)
3. Kimberly Campanello, MOTHERBABYHOME Reader’s Edition Book (Manchester: zimZalla, 2019)
4. Kimberly Campanello, Film caption clip from durational performance of MOTHERBABYHOME for the Irish Poetry Reading Archive (University College Dublin Special Collections, 2020)
LINK TO – Further information on MOTHERBABYHOME
LINK TO – publisher of MOTHERBABYHOME
LINK TO – complete durational performance of MOTHERBABYHOME
<< Delphine Chapuis Schmitz
I work as an artist, as a writer, as a teacher, as an editor, as a translator, and these different practices intertwine in a transversal research dedicated to the exploration of writing as a relational process. Departing from the model of writing as an act of expression by an individual subject, I focus on situative, embedded, and embodied writing processes. I am particularly interested in writing processes which involve displacement in, with and through language(s), as well as by iterative processes of writing which explore ways of (re-)articulating individual with collective dimensions. My research thus aims at assessing the transformative potential of writing for subjectivation processes which enact and implement relational modes of subjectivity.
je voudrais parler des subjects Subjekte que nous sommes – werden – in the process of becoming
je voudrais share that’s why I’m here
eigentlich möchte ich über das Schreiben sprechen but bevor I start a few Bemerkungen:
(one) As you can hear je tente (try) de me décider de settle on a language
Sprache
it’s not easy (einfach) Ich werde scheitern I will – that’s the point
(two) Je vais vous parler in der ersten Person I’m gonna sinplural ich (eyes)
werde euch in der first person du plurilier erzählen
wie wir I werde wir
wie wir sehen wie wir werden
ist Ich nur annähernd nicht mal als approximation geeignet.
C’est le core of what I’d like to share with you I = one:others
The writing situation has been developed for transdisciplinary settings with groups of 6 to 12 participants working together in a context of artistic research. It is conceived as an iterative process of writing where individual and collective moments intertwine. It aims at fostering transversal exchange and collaborations by activating resonances between texts and practices.
Each participant is invited to bring to the meeting an A4 page displaying a text to be shared. The situation unfolds in two sequences.
(1)
– Step one: In a circle, the participants take turn to read aloud the text they have brought. They can navigate the text freely and read for as long as they feel like while the others listen.
– Step two: The participants engage in an individual session of free writing on dedicated tables previously arranged in the room. They write by hand in resonance with what they have experienced in step one (duration: 6 to 12 minutes).
– The participants exchange their texts. Step one is repeated with the texts received from others, followed by step two.
– A third iteration of the process can be carried through.
(2)
– In groups of 2 or 3, the participants exchange about what they have experienced in (1) and read from the texts they have written during step two. Together they weave a short text as an echo to their exchange.
– The woven texts are shared / performed in the whole group, followed by an exchange about the resonances activated between the texts and practices of the participants.
CREDITS
1-3. Sketches of the different steps of the writing situation “activating resonances in transdisciplinary constellations”.
I have developed an extensive practice of writing with others’ words which aims at exploring relationalities between various textual sources and activating resonances between them. This practice can be seen as a continuation to Donna Haraway’s invitation to thinking with – echoing Isabelle Stengers’ call to the same.
This practice starts with choosing a book or a selection of books to engage with in a given situation and for a specific purpose. While reading, collect the words, phrases, and sentences which you find, or rather which find you, and gather them in a dedicated document. Once an adequate amount has been reached, read and re-read the text passages. Let them resonate in their new form and bring them in an arrangement of shifts and flows following a variety of relations – semantic, discursive, and/or poetic.
Then proceed to give the text passages an appropriate form for the given space, be it the walls of an art space or the pages of a book, in order to compose a situated meshwork to be further activated by readers in their situated encounters with the texts. While doing so, the previous arrangement might shift as it adjusts to the specific context of its manifestation.
This practice explores singular shifts as part of the writing process and activates embodied, and embedded processes of making sense with others’ words in concrete situations of dis-placement.
CREDITS
1. The Quest, Artist Book, with a text by Geraldine Tedder, designed by Delphine Chapuis Schmitz and Guillaume Mojon, backbonebooks, 2019. Photo credits: Guillaume Mojon.
2. The Quest, Artist Book, with a text by Geraldine Tedder, designed by Delphine Chapuis Schmitz and Guillaume Mojon, backbonebooks, 2019. Photo credits: Christoph Schifferli
3. SCRIPTS!, multi-medial installation, exhibition view, Grand Palais, Berne, 2019. Photo: Sabina Gruhne.
<< Emma Cocker
I am a writer-artist whose language-based artistic research comprises a matrix of writing, reading and conversation practices, including diverse process-oriented, dialogic-collaborative and aesthetic-poetic approaches to working with and through language. I often work in collaboration with other artistic researchers on durational projects unfolding over a number of years, where the studio-gallery, site-specific context or even an online environment are approached as a live laboratory for shared exploration. I am interested in the potential of language as a site of ‘not knowing’ by asking — how might I attempt to write-with the not-yet-known, creating conditions for the emergence of a vocabulary live to the occasionality of each research situation, where content is not already known in advance but rather comes-into-being through the embodied and material process of working-with language? Working with different language-based practices — including performative, poetic, and perhaps even phenomenology-oriented approaches — my ongoing research involves the dual attempt to bring to reflective awareness the experiential and relational aspects of artistic thinking-in-action, whilst searching for a mode of linguistic expression capable of operating in fidelity to that experience. Over the last fifteen years, I have evolved a practice of creative prose writing called ‘contiguous writing’ (a mode of writing-with that seeks to touch upon rather than being explicitly about), in parallel to developing a language-based artistic research practice called ‘conversation-as-material’. In recent research projects, I have been exploring different collaborative approaches to language that work with score-based writing, conversation and experimental reading practices. In the examples presented in this Practice Sharing, I share how the bringing-into-relation of specific conversation practices and reading practices have been activated within two specific collaborative contexts.
Dorsal Practices is an artistic collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer-artist Emma Cocker. Our shared research enquiry explores how the notion of dorsality and the cultivation of a back-oriented awareness might enable new modes of thinking-perceiving and being-with, more connected, sustainable ways of living and aliveness based on the reciprocal, entangled relationship between self/environment. Rather than a mode of withdrawal, of turning one’s back, how might a backwards-leaning orientation support an open, receptive ethics of relation? Central to this enquiry is an attempt to explore how different linguistic practices might be developed in fidelity to the embodied experiences of dorsality; how the experiences of listening, languaging, even thinking, might be shaped differently through this embodied tilt of awareness and attention towards the back? Since January 2021, we have developed Dorsal Practices through the interrelation of three fields of experimental, embodied practice: movement-based practices; conversation practices, and experimental reading practices. Firstly, our nexus of practices involves the physical experience of dorsal orientation through various bodily-movement exercises and scores. After each month-long phase of body-based somatic-movement practices, we come together (usually online on zoom) for a process of conversation involving timed ‘turn-taking’ allowing us to each speak without interruption, moreover, for fully focused ‘deep listening’. Often undertaken back-to-back (subverting frontal habits of online meeting) our conversations foster sensitive interaction, heightening attention to the embodied experience of listening and being listened to, allowing for an emergent ‘dorsal voicing’. The conversation transcripts are then reactivated and re-organised through various experimental reading practices — conceived as an experimental, improvisational approach to textual genesis — where a mode of linguistic sense-making emerges live through the interplay of spoken word, the intersubjective interweaving of two voices within the occasionality of dialogic encounter.
CREDITS AND LINKS
1. Dorsal Practices, documentation of a series of conversation practices on zoom.
2. Dorsal Practices, [extract] documentation of a reading practice on zoom (also including a section of 'Etymological Exploration' [see link to full version below]
3. Dorsal Practices, still from a recording of a performance reading, 2022. Filmed by Leon Lockley. [See link below]
LINK TO - Dorsal Practices (work-in-process archive of research project)
LINK TO - Dorsal Reading (extract of a performance reading)
THINKING AESTHETIC THINKING THROUGH AESTHETIC RESEARCH PRACTICES
a collaboration with Alex Arteaga, Nicole Wendel [and Sabine Zahn]
thinking aesthetic thinking through aesthetic research practices is a practice-driven investigation into aesthetic sense-making initiated by Alex Arteaga in 2020. Since 2021, we — Alex Arteaga, Emma Cocker, Nicole Wendel [and with Sabine Zahn in the first phase of this project]— have been working together online within a series of exploratory sessions or even ‘laboratories’, enquiring through specific aesthetic research practices in different media (drawing, video, sound, language, body movement, material encounters, spatial configurations) the practice and conditions of and for a specific form of thinking: aesthetic thinking. Whilst geographically distanced (working in Barcelona, Berlin, Sheffield), we tested how platforms such as zoom can be activated as a creative tool of engagement for bringing different practices into relation, for enabling (through various devices of text, sound and image recording and display) a mode of aesthetic enquiry. We ask: How do specific aesthetic research practices enable/enhance aesthetic thinking? What kinds of practices can be developed, tested and shared? How does the coexistence, coinciding and mutual conditioning of different practices enable/enhance aesthetic thinking? How might we bring different practices into relation? Central to the enquiry has been the testing of different ecologies of aesthetic research practices (or “ecologies in action”) — a set of interconnected aesthetic practices in action with aesthetic thinking as the focus of inquiry for these various research practices — which aim to provide conditions for evidence of what aesthetic thinking might be. Within this specific collaborative context, ‘single practices’ of score-based conversation and experimental reading have been further evolved and tested within the frame of a series of ‘ecologies in action’ — which can be encountered within the extracts presented above.
CREDITS AND LINKS
1. Alex Arteaga, Emma Cocker, Nicole Wendel, extract from Ecology in Action (18.10.2022): an ecology involving the Practices of Very Slow Video Observation (AA), Reading as Distillation (EC), and Explorative Drawing (NW).
2. Alex Arteaga, Emma Cocker, Nicole Wendel, extract from Ecology in Action (18.10.2022): an ecology involving the Practices of Exploratory Essay Writing (AA), Live Transcription of Conversation (EC), and Material Encounter (NW).
LINK TO - Ecologies in Action page of the thinking aesthetic thinking... project archive [to encounter the full recording of the Ecology in Action from 18.10.2022]
<< Joanna Cook
As a dance artist, researcher and choreographer I am interested in physically morphing, expanding and pressing into intersemiotic embodied, oral and inscribed languages. This interest grows from my personal experiences of gender-based systematic and cultural traditions of feminine silencing my desire to cultivate vocabularies of resistance and repair. Creating space for dissidents and rebelling against trained behaviours by cultivating lingual and non-lingual approaches to languaging, artmaking and choreographic practice that expand notions of dance beyond disciplinary boundaries. Aiming to cultivate multimodal vocabularies, I pick up threads from disciplines such as: movement, writing, artist books, sonics, digital spaces and installation practices and wonder how these modalities might weave together to cultivate polyphonic emergent languages within the context of each project. Rather than engaging diverse modes to translate the same concept in different ways I am interested in how disparate modes might work together to evolve and add their own thread to the tapestry of a project. By paying attention to, valuing the touch of and the fold between modes I desire to create archives of touch that continue unfolding of the logics of the project, not only within the process, practice, and performance but also within the curation of the traces left behind: thinking of the archive as a living assemblage.
Language as…..
language as...
an ever emergent,
ever evolving proposition.
I am interested in exploring the way languages move through my own and my collaborators' flesh, bodies and mouths cultivating possibilities / problems / potentials through partial and (mis)translations. Pulling at the edges of disciplinary modalities to cultivate ever emergent vocabularies that erupt out of silenced (organic/biological) bodies, bursting the seams of early somatic obedience. I desire to push language into a space of else-ness: doing something else with words, elasticising the boundaries of what wor(l)ds can be.
This is a multimodal, multifaceted practice that unfolds within a dance studio and a screenprinting space. I collaborate with a print expert to learn some of the vocabulary of the discipline. Together we iteratively create screen printed membranes that become a second skin for the dancers, layering these with text over time. The surface of language literally stretches as the human body moves within, bodies (human and nonhuman) entwining, moving with, moved by each other.
The membrane
a non-gendered holding space,
an outer skin that hinders and supports
pushing into each other's edges.
Within the dance studio the practice manifests as an embodied collaborative practice that desires to unpick some of the “rules” or expectations of dancers/choreographers and the plethora of conditioning we have ingested within our dancerly training. We explore practices of (in)(a)ten(t)(s)ion, active/passive bodies, (un)silent positions of power(less ness), and re:view disciplinary silos, modes/modalities, (micro)hierarchies and contextual ecologies. The practice desires to unfold different ways of moving and sounding.
Provocations grow from conversation:
Imprint space with your body;
push in closer to avoid the pain;
touch without touch.
We engage with freewriting, authentic sound creation (breath/sounds of exertion/improvised spoken choreographies) and conscious streams of thought through sound/spoken word/movement/writing to connect, resist and explore notions that emerge. We play with lighting, creating a ‘performance state’ within each practice so that the moments of witness are not seen as more ‘important’ than any other. Instead re:viewing it as a moment of navigating the new witnessing bodies in space and exploring what potentials arrive/arise from this new relationality.
CREDITS AND LINKS
1. Joanna Cook, Expanding (practices of) Flesh. (2022) Credit: Jocelyn Janon. Dancers: Joanna Cook and Yin-Chi Lee.
2. Joanna Cook, Expanding Membrane (2022). Credit: Yin-Chi Lee. Dancers: Lily Jones-Harvey, Alexandra Lamm, Emma Neill
3. Joanna Cook, Expanding Limb(s) (2022) Credit: Yin-Chi Lee. Dancer: Alexandra Lamm
4. Joanna Cook, Expanding (practices of) Flesh. Rehearsal as performance. Filming/editing Joanna Cook and Yin-Chi Lee.
LINK TO - @expandingflesh
This work materialised through a desire to re:view notions of liveness within the epidemiological milieu. It began within the shaky terrain of the pandemic where I grew an obsession with my nurture object (a cup of tea). The tea bag inspired the iterations of the work through cycles of use, imagination, response-ability, collaboration, repair, and care. My growing awareness of the shaping/silencing that was conditioned into the layers of my skin, caused me to question: can I unpick this (feminine) silence from my skin? Can I create languages of undoing that unfold through a series of multimodal creative languages (digital, embodied, inscribed)? Through small daily actions I cultivated a rich multimodal practice that allowed me to engage embodied, material, and intersemiotic creative experimentations. These experimentations were then curated onto a digital space.
Each (web)page is like a mini theatre, waiting to be experienced, to be touched with your eyes, fragmented by the movement of your mouse. Within this work, language unfolds in lingual and non-lingual ways - through the sound, movement, video framing, page (choreographic) curation, each element carefully considered and designed to communicate in multifarious ways. It is a digital space designed with its own sense of timing, not to be rushed, encouraging a slowing down.
Space to breathe. Time to allow the site to TOUCH you.
Much of this practice unravelled in secret, within the confines of my home, behind closed doors. I desire to let You in. To be seen by You. Allowing You to create Your own understandings, Your own conversation with the digital space. Inviting You, the witness, to be active in creating Your own translations and interpretations.
CREDITS AND LINKS
1. Fragments of Silent Skin Digital Artwork. (2020) Photo Credit(s): Jocelyn Janon, Yin-Chi Lee. Dancer: Joanna Cook. Website Design: Joanna Cook.
LINK TO: Fragments of Silent Skin
<< Adélia Santos Costa
How can memorial writing be an act of re-enactment of past events? Re-enactment studies suggest that it is possible to translate a past collective experience to our intimate sphere. Our approach to language as re-enactment is based on Collingwood’s perspective that to understand human action, we should focus not only on the thoughts behind it, but we must re-enact that thought in our mind. By exercising empathy as practice, re-enactment opens a spectrum in writing, which allows us to understand and grasp the reality of others (Mocnik, 2020: 219). Beyond historical revivalism, re-enactment is also a narration practice by which stories are not just told but lived.
As Barthes argued, language is a third skin that unites us, a way of extending our fingers to touch others through words (1977, p. 176). As a memorial practice, writing acts upon us as a third skin, a language by which a past event reaches us and touches others. Nonetheless, we cannot acknowledge the experience of others entirely. Our lived experiences cannot be transferred as such to others. The meaning of our experiences can only be shared as part of our language (Ricoeur, 1976, p. 16).
In previous decades, memorials emerged as critical forms of re-enacting traumatic memories in public spaces. These practices created new ways of using language, framing the epigraph as a performative and relational device.
Our research addresses the relationship between writing, memorialisation and re-enactment through a contextual practice that questions notions of monument and epigraphy in public spaces.
REFERENCES
Mocnik, Nena, “Trauma” in Vanessa Agnew, Jonathan Lamb e Juliane Tomann (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Re-enactment Studies – Key Terms in the Field, (New York: Routledge, 2020).
Roland Barthes, Fragments d'un Discours Amoureux, (Paris: Ed. Seuil, 1977).
Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning, (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976).
REDRESS – A writing experience in the Memorial Fronteira da Paz, Vilar Formoso, Portugal
Fronteira da Paz Memorial houses written testimonies and visual documentation about refugees crossing Portuguese borders to escape war in Europe from 1939-1945. Like all memorials, it embodies a sense of place and belonging. Its narrative is constructed mainly through language: educational texts; bureaucratic documents related to border control; written testimonies of the refugees connecting us to the experience on the historical level.
REDRESS is an act of language where words are embroidered in a burlap dress after the written documentation. As the body stands in front of the documentary projections, embroidered threads become sentences and sentences become texts, a way of interweaving speech, dress and skin.
REDRESS re-enacts a process of surrender where I give myself to the words of others. Written testimonies became an act of presence.
Re-enacting a testimony is more than creating a narrative of a spoken or written document. A testimony is something on which we base ourselves to think or act. It extends our knowledge beyond reason, memory or direct experience because it ensures the inscription of experiences on the margins of the historical discourse. That is why testimony is not a purely factual description but a speech act like a promise, where a future commitment is hidden.
Writing as re-enactment is a critical tool connecting us to a lived present, a way of inhabiting both space and memory. However, REDRESS is also an exercise on the right to opacity – a way of accepting the other’s language without fully understanding it.
CREDITS AND LINKS
1. Adélia Santos Costa, 2022. Redress. Burlap, cotton yarn, needle. Variable dimensions. Note: Burlap dress to be worn by the artist during performance.
2. Adélia Santos Costa, Redress, Embroidering words in the burlap dress.Detail of performance that took place in Fronteira da Paz Memorial, Vilar Formoso, Portugal 2022
3. Adélia Santos Costa, Redress. Installation of the artwork in front of a video projection in the Memorial Fronteira da Paz Memorial, Vilar Formoso, Portugal 2022
Adélia Santos Costa | Ph.D student
Ph.D Professor Paulo Luís Almeida | Supervisor
Ph.D Professor Emílio Remelhe | Co-Supervisor
FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology
FBAUP – Faculty of Fine Arts – University of Porto
i2ads – Institute of Research Art, Design and Society
<< Michael Croft
How one speaks and how one writes may be considered different. That said; how one writes is driven considerably by one’s own internal monologue, its idiosyncrasies of speech largely corrected automatically by the conditions of writing. In writing, however, one often strives to communicate, on the assumption that this is possible. Speech that bears its own implicit enunciation is unlikely to make it to the page, as it were, unless – which is a question that greatly interests me – one punctuates it and retains grammar in elements of dysfluency. Typify one’s speech as reflexive, and concerned with reflection on the nature of another activity, such as drawing, where speech and drawing are thereby drawn together. Typify writing as reflective critique of drawing, where one’s theoretical sources are brought into play. This is proposing the orientation of artistic research from the perspective of language, whereas the same ratio may be proposed from the perspective of drawing. Add to this a current interest in the structuring of artistic research itself, debated through language and drawing, where language is both a creative tool in its own right, and a means of developing reflective critical argument. What one can do through language, that is arguably more resourceful in this respect than drawing, is to speak in and through writing in variable voices. Taking the visual-material medium of drawing as the generator of interest in language, the starting basis of inquiry is perception, mainly visual, but also involving other senses.
The above dialigue is a fragment of a hybrid text that maps the movement of artistic research with Lacan’s Logical Square, and considers the positioning of the author as subject within such research.
This is a hybrid text firstly because it is written, arguably, as creative writing that involves an author-artist’s voice, the voice of a fictional character as a declared other to the author-artist, reference to artwork itself as, in effect, a voice, and the mute presence of myself as the work’s author, as a voice. The content is a discussion of how Lacan’s logical square can be adapted to explain the relationship of artistic research to the full cycle of start-to-finish of the creation of an artwork. Mapped with the logical square, is the structure and operation of the Hysteric’s Discourse, of Lacan’s four generic discourses. This enables the consideration of the author-artist and his fictional other as conjoined subject within the movement. While the discussion is presented through language, the two Lacanian sources are themselves linguistically based to articulate various human and related nonhuman propositions. Then secondly, while the writing style is both informal and involves elements of conversation between the author-artist and the fictional character, as if they were separate people, what they say is substantially academically referenced as footnotes, for which reason the text veers to the academic. My understanding of the logical square is thought and illustrated through a developmental diagram, which the reader can reference in relation to the linguistic argument. The format of the text is experimental for the above reasons, and is therefore research-based as a language-based example of what constitutes artistic-research process, while the diagram supports the latter through and as visual research.
CREDITS AND LINKS
1.Extract: the author-artist in conversation with his fictional other, Momrey + showing how footnotes are used, and a jpeg of the text’s referenced diagram.
2. Michael Croft, A diagram [from the article, Artistic Research Mapped] showing Lacan’s logical square, colour-coded green, mapped with Lacan’s generic structure of his Four Discourses, colour-coded black, and Lacan’s Hysteric’s Discourse colour-coded blue. Dermatograph pencils on corroded handmade paper, 76 x 52cm, 2023.
3. Michael Croft, A diagram [from the article, Artistic Research Mapped]. The diagram, second state, showing Lacan’s logical square, colour-coded green, mapped with
Lacan’s generic structure of his Four Discourses, colour-coded black, Lacan’s Hysteric’s Discourse colour-coded blue, and the coming into the square from the mid-left. Dermatograph pencils, coffee stain and ink stains on corroded handmade paper, 76 x 52cm, 2023
4. Michael Croft, A diagram [from the article, Artistic Research Mapped]. The diagram, fifth state, showing Lacan’s logical square, reworked to re-emphasize mapped aspects of Lacan’s Hysteric’s Discourse, with additional hand-written explanation. Dermatograph pencils, coffee stain, ink stains and crayon on corroded handmade paper, 76 x 52cm, 2023
Two monologic transcripts and the return of conflated sections of them to speech that oscillates between sense and non-sense.
The work brings into it and adapts a previous recent practice concerned with speaking while simultaneously drawing, audio-visually recording two states of the process, transcribing the monologues, and alternately interspersing the monologues line-by-line.
Such a practice is taken up at the level of the interspersed monologues to show and reconsider their content as potentially readable. The editting and facilitating of such readability, however, returns the spoken content to written, while reading it maintains therole of voice. The read content as short audio-recordings, termed cameos, wavers between sense and non-sense, while being read as if it were making sense. This is animportant aspect of the work’s content; that the chance encounter of the alternate lines generates language that dips in and out of sense, where reading it can both further imply sense and, without stalling through speech-based disfluency, does still expose challenges to sense. The cited theory, especially reference to Lacan’s coined term, ‘ab-sense’, as opposed to non-sense, helps to shed light on what has been suggested above aswavering of meaning. The reader can, if they wish, also view the drawings that generated, and had in their turn been generated by, the speech, although they’re not essential to the expositions’ purpose.
CREDITS AND LINKS
1. - 2. Extract: Showing a section of the conjoined transcripts edited as Cameo 3, and some indication of its discussion + a referenced drawing.
LINK TO - Speech Spoken (exposition)
Years ago, in a Wikipedia article, I found the following question: How high must an elevation be to be called ‘hill’? It immeditely spoke to me. I stripped the interrogatory sentence from its content and turned it into a template for constrained/automated thinking:
How _ _ _ _ _ must a/an _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ be to be called ‘_ _ _ _ __ _ _’.
In the last years, I have used the above sentence in many different settings and workshops. In the context of the participatory performance Questionology (Daus/Ruth), see image 1., the sentence became a “midwife” for a group of three to four people to come up with a question of matter. First, each writer began by noting down raw thoughts related to a phenomenon they wished to inquire into. Secondly, the writers filled out the blank spaces of the template sentence. Serving as a support structure for thinking each of their sentences traveled several rounds. During this round the other writers were allowed to re-write, sharpen, re-shape the question before it returned to the original author/sender.
Working with the same template sentence over a hundred times provided surprising insights into the potentials of constrained writing and co-thinking. A major part of the exercise consisted in learning how to overcome one’s perfectionism, in letting go. By delegating decisions to a ‘system’ – in this case, a small linguistic unit and score – the writers could not be held responsible over what was generated. Freed from the burden of ‘response-ability’ they observed how 'their' question got re-shaped, how it travelled through different brains and handwritings before returning to the original senders.
CREDITS AND LINKS
1. Group working on borrowed questions, Questionology, June 2021, Zentrum Fokus Forschung/brut Wien, Photo: Fabian Weiss
2. How high must an elevation be to be called ‘hill’?, template question and examples
LINK TO - Questionology
<< Cordula Daus
My practice investigates how meaning is made; literally, how artistic research can render systems and cultural codes of meaning making transparent in order to disturb and collectively remake them. Working across expanded books, live installations and performances, I often borrow vocabulary and metrics from other disciplines. My novel SEHR, for example, features the adventures of a middle-aged female knight who goes on a quest for meaning lesser sex. Seismic scales here served as a model to approach the emotional intensities of 'fucking', 'loving' and 'grieving'.
The phenomenon of pregnancy is central for my current research project. In collaboration with other artists and scientists, I/we create situations that invite to rework gendered codes of productivity and (re)production asking ourselves: What is sex? How to write with/from a body? What can we learn from pregnant people? How can we invent new forms of co-creation in and through language?
In the following, I am sharing two examples of collaborative doings with language: 1) speaking-apart-together (‘Miteinander Vorbeireden’), a kind of split dialogue and 2) Borrowing a Question. Those micropractices have emerged within two larger artistic research projects: Outer Woman experiments with the abolition of pregnancy, an ectogenetic world where relations and bonds need to been remade (in collaboration with Sebastian Bark, [M] Dudeck and Charlotta Ruth, funded by Austrian Science Fund/FWF: V 797). In Questionology we train what might be the last genuinely human quality: to question, to be questioned (in collaboration with Charlotta Ruth).
LINK TO – Cordula Daus’s website
For some years now I have been in conversation with midwives and pregnant women. (How to support a person in their process? How do pain and knowing relate to each other?) Parallel to this field research I develop conversation games and performative scores as research with and in language. With Charlotta Ruth I experiment with questions/questioning as a form of co-creational thinking and as a method that allows to lay bare default structures of languaging. The audio excerpt (1.) features one of our live improvisations. In this experiment we test how to speak from different realms/disciplines at once:
I pose question as if I was speaking to a midwife. Charlotta Ruth responds but from her experience as a choreographer and 'artistic midwife'. We listen to each other while also letting ourselves drift and triggered by single words. Those words become metaphors that travel back and forth between us. Suddenly our game comes to a crisis. Glitches occur. Awkward creatures and unethical realities emerge: 'split ass agonies', 'commissioned children' and 'abortion artists'.
Our conversation game has a long history. Back in 369 BCE Socrates already compared the act of questioning with midwifing and thinking in dialogue with a gestational process. He famously performs his own method (also called 'maieutics', from maia = midwife) in Plato’s Theaetetus. In this classical text two men – the eponymous Theaetetus, a young mathematician and the philosopher Socrates – enter into a conversation about the essence of knowledge: “I suspect that you are in labor. Come then to me, who I am a midwife, and the son of a midwife, and I will deliver you.” In our audio example above, two female artists who have given birth, engage in another kind of maieutics strategically blurring the classic division of labor between body and mind, between the literal and the metaphoric.
CREDITS AND LINKS
1. On Midwifing – the metaphor strikes back (excerpt from podcast 3:51 min), Daus/Ruth, 2023
2. The Sublation Game (Invitation, 09/2022), image: Daus/Dudeck
<< Kostas Daflos
My artistic spatial practice in public acts is informed by tactics and technics from the everyday life and the social place, and is focused on borders, identities and bodies, involving the language as medium (actor) in the main stages and in the partial steps of their elaboration. I am an architect, artist and practice-based researcher (associate professor in Athens Scholl of architecture NTUA) working across the fields of architecture, sculpture, new media (robotic installations) and writing.
I am working with dialogue tactics that are directed towards testing and application (transcription) in different media that directed around questions such as:
-How do unusual or strange arrangements, tactics and modes in public space create conditions of familiarity rather than alienation?
-What are the components of the ephemeral shifting heterotopic space realized in nomadic acts? And how are the boundaries between the poetic element and the literal element of each acts defined?
-What elements determine the political and social content of forms of association in public space based on the dialogue developed supported by technologies?
-Is the relationship between nomadic art practices and the nomadic character developed by texts a given?
In the first case presented, the content of the text takes the place of a directive (instruction), which determines the artistic practice followed in the text. This is followed and performed by applications in several media (materials) with different technics according to the special content of the text.
In the second case, the text appears in the simple form of a public broadcast from phrases and words (in the local and other languages), following familiar contexts of demonstration or protest. The content of the tactic becomes analogous to information campaigns through sound broadcasting and listening in the public space.
LINK TO – Kostas Daflos's webpage
In a series of performances with oral raw material and background noises (words, texts, sound, voices), I explore through the Cipo_ program (Cybernetic Intelligent Parasitic Object), methods between public art and dialogical space in the urban terrain via sound and text where a local public sphere could emerge.In these artworks are raised questions on how the expression of different collective acts (like participation, collaboration, relational approaches) perform relationships. They manifest functional and poetic dimensions with computer and robot technologies (sensors, motors, etc.) (apparatus) on trailers (handcarts trolleys), activating sound responses dialogically, repetitively and differentially in random combinations from word playbacks (archive files, recordings from suppressed political protest demonstration of debt crisis, music notes of barrel organ ‘laterna’, garbage truck noises, soundscape, etc.).
The cipo_vehicles (handcarts trolleys) refer to public art in urban interventions (nomadic performance), that are based in the do-it-yourself (DIY) approach, as an active toolkit in the local socio-political situations, formed by different ready-made parts, showing together elements of intimacy and heterogeneity, of visibility and hiding. They distribute different mixes and reproductions from prerecorded material of past speeches of audience (voices, oral texts) with sounds (melodies, music notes, sonic environments, soundscapes), as interactive broadcasts in real time with random compositions which are triggered by sounds, background noises and voices from the streets.
CREDITS AND LINKS
Images: Stills from cipo_00 lego (for rent)
camera by Valia Karapidaki
for “ΕΝΟΙΚΙΑΖΕΤΑΙ project #1”
LINK TO - VIDEO cipo_00 lego (for rent)
Acts of restoration & documentation of the acts (mail art, postal poem, visual poetry, stencil graffiti performance)
A series of recovery acts begins with a postscript in the last sentence, of a handwritten suicide letter from a self-inflicted person, according to his last wish ‘that the letter must be destroyed’, managing the interventions in the text. Performative art practices, according to the last wish or command, reconstruct the context through a series of different technical works on this letter, exploring ways of publishing with art practices the news today, instead of publishing the actual event in the daily press.
Interventions on letter: Wax impregnations and waxing, seaming, threading through, replacement of letters and words with the use of a cutter (knife) and a stapler, reforming the grammar elements in a cryptic process.
Specific cryptic acts:
- seam throughout the letters to hide the writing
- inversion of the typographical technique of typesetting, according to the separation in the printer's boxes, accumulating and stitching the identical characters in the first appearing letters of each series
- matching and coating words with the same number of characters from words that have been removed between two letter copies
- waxing of the letters and coating all words with wax back and forth
- eliminate similar characters in the text that specify the victim's name
- creation of a stencil matrix of the letters
Performances:
* readings, writing in stencils with spray (stencil art), postal art (mail art)
CREDITS
1-3. Tear up the letters
for Sozopolis, “Academia Romantica” in Athens
photos by Thanos Papadopoulos
(catalogue) Kostas Daflos, Cipo_ vehicles: mail art | stencil | embroideries || pattern book,Blurb Inc., 2021, pp.111-120
With an expanded understanding of language, our collaborative project includes two practitioners sharing their own language based inquiry. Embedded in different countries and cultural dance contexts, we both share the impulse as artists to unravel meanings through our bodies and celebrate the versatility of how uniquely they find expression through hand gestures. A 3-week residency by Raw Matters in Vienna in March 2023 will serve to rethink some of the ready-made concepts that govern our personal and communal lives. We map and inspire the mobilization and personalization of static concepts in order to evoke more resilient human beings and more sustainable communities, by conversing with animate subjects, not objects. It thus, requires a subjective language that derives from the depth of our felt experience, encouraging a first person science and a new metaphorical language that is deeply personal. To do this we are drawing on Minou’s research in first person science and her research called personal literacies, and on Jahnavi’s research into sign language and trans-cultural hand gestures drawing upon Inter-translations and inter-pretations with(in) a set of chosen languages: English, German, Austrian sign language, Indian Sign Language, Indian classical dance and contemporary dance. We choose these as a sharing base and wish to expand our literacies through dialogue together. This project fits within Janhavi’s doctoral research: of re-imagining the mainstream by celebrating the differences with and of margins - here the Deaf community as well as dance practice and practitioners as being on the periphery of academia.
Dance/ Empathy Dialogues begins with a comparative study of embodied gestures through varied movement vocabularies: in Indian classical dance, in various Sign languages for the Deaf, and through expressing and finding new gestures. We focus on embodied semantics in creation of gestures and hermeneutics in analysing these. We select certain phrases to compare individual sign language expressions of these meanings and via performative moments highlight and celebrate their versatility, uniqueness, their commonalities and differences. This research will bring together dancers and people who primarily use sign language. We will conduct choreographic and semantic studies of different ways of making meaning and how this can be highlighted and explored via choreographic tools and scores. We will deviate from our comparative study when we incorporate Personal Literacy exploration in order to develop personal gestural language via phenomenological explorations.
To expand access to embodied meaning-making, we begin with our own practices and vocabularies (of Indian classical dance styles) and find non-traditional alternatives through first person experience and expression within these. We then expand our language base and compare the expression of same words or score in different Deaf sign languages, which share the same cultural ethos as our prior vocabularies.
CREDITS
1. MT Polleros and Janhavi Dhamankar, Dance Dialogues / Movement Choir.
<< Janhavi Dhamankar & Minou Tsambika Polleros
Personal Literacies began as a movement and photography exploration in 2012. The project draws on the rising shift in scientific, cultural and artistic research towards a more embodied cognition described as the ‘corporeal turn’. This work is an ongoing research into first person perception and expression of phenomena as directly experienced offering an alternative to what has already been defined and fixed in meaning through language. The work wants to provoke a more bodily perception and expression of phenomena in the natural world and well-known concepts, encouraging the personal creation of embodied meaning and with it the outer agency that derives from such incorporation. With this project I want to encourage a bodily experience, illuminating the personal dimension and reciprocity of perception via phenomenological enquiry and celebrating the versatility of how uniquely they find expression through hand gesture. Personal Literacies draws upon the visceral dimension that exists between all animate bodies and the necessity to rethink some of the ready-made concepts that are fixing the meaning making in our personal and communal lives. It wants to call into attention that the creation of meaning is a profoundly personal process and cannot only be dictated by outer bodies. The project wants to re-kindle a stronger relationship with the natural world, leaning towards the philosophy of conversing with animate subjects, not objects. It thus, requires a subjective language.
CREDITS
1. Personal Literacies 2012: a work by Minou Tsambika Polleros. Participants are Vanessa Sancho, Ivan Kirchgasser and Markus Stefan.
2. Personal Literacies 2012: a work by Minou Tsambika Polleros. Photography: Markus Stefan.
3. Personal Literacies 2012: a work by Minou Tsambika Polleros. Photography: Martina Polleros.
4. Personal Literacies 2012: a work by Minou Tsambika Polleros. Photography: Vanessa Sancho