TEXTORIUM: Collaborative Writing-Reading with/in Public Space

Emma Cocker

Textorium: Collaborative Writing-Reading with/in Public Space is a language-based artistic research project that explores collaborative score-based approaches to live, situated writing and reading practices, for attending to the experiential aspects of situated embodiment with/in public space. Between 30 May — 4 June 2022, five artist-writers (Emma Cocker, Andrea Coyotzi Borja, Cordula Daus, Vidha Saumya and Lena Séraphin) met in Vaasa, Finland, to engage in a process of observational and collective score-based writing-reading with/in public space. With its conceptual anchor in Georges Perec’s short book An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (1975/2010), this enquiry evolves a distinctive approach that foregrounds a corporeal, sensorial and bodily approach to language, where writing and reading are conceived as a collaborative undertaking rather than a solitary endeavour. Working with and through different language-based practices — including performative, poetic, and phenomenology-oriented approaches — the research explores the potentiality of emergent spaces (perhaps even of emergent temporalities, subjectivities and collectivities) produced through the interweaving of shared writing and reading practices, as the cyclical rhythms of writing/reading intermingle with the circulating movements, momentums and flows of public space. Through developing and testing various embodied, corporeal, sensorial, and collaborative approaches, this research enquiry advocates the transformative capacity of language-based artistic research for cultivating new “ecologies of attention” (Yves Citton, 2017). This shared enquiry explores the critical potentiality of our “linguistic bodies” (Di Paolo, Cuffari, and De Jaegher, 2018) as sites of both resistance and affirmation.

CIRCULATING PRACTICES

* SCORE/ARTEFACTS: WHAT IS AGREED UPON?

* RE-TURNING (I)

* SCORE/ARTEFACTS: ACOUSMATIC

* RE-TURNING (I I)

* SCORE/ARTEFACTS: WHAT RESISTS?

* RE-TURNING (III)

* SCORE/ARTEFACTS: SAY IT AGAIN

* COLLECTIVE READINGS

CONTEXTUAL FRAMING

* CONTEXTUALISING ESSAY

To navigate this exposition, you can either use the hyperlinks (menu above) or RC CONTENTS.

Click on this icon (top left of each page) to bring you back to previous page (menu page or landing page)

NAVIGATING THE EXPOSITION

This exposition attempts to show our 'circulating practices' of collaborative writing-reading with/in public space.

It is organised with two entry pathways: (1) CIRCULATING PRACTICES and (2) CONTEXTUAL FRAMING:

[See links to the left].

(1) CIRCULATING PRACTICES

These pages can be explored experientially in a non-linear, intuitive way, where texts/materials can be dipped into or lingered over. We invite you — the reader — to dive in and explore your own pathway through:

* SCORES/ARTEFACTS: We present four blocks of exploration generated in and through our shared practising together: What is Agreed Upon?; Acousmatic; What Resists? and Say it Again. For each of these blocks of exploration, we attempt to share or demonstrate the practice itself by presenting the initiating 'score' alongside its resulting artefacts (written texts and sound recordings) in conjunction with some photographic documentation.

* RE-TURNINGS: Here we attempt to re-activate and re-engage with our shared experience of collaborative writing with/in public space, through further language-based practices of reading and conversation.

* COLLECTIVE READINGS: On this page, you — the reader — are invited to play (with) and explore the different sound recordings of our readings, encountering for yourself what might emerge through the practice of listening.

(2) CONTEXTUAL FRAMING

These pages within the exposition are conceived in support of our 'circulating practices'. The RELATED ENQUIRIES page and THE SQUARE are considered more auxiliary, whilst the CONTEXTUALISING ESSAY offers an extended framing of our enquiry, which can be read online or downloaded as a PDF.

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