This RELATED ENQUIRIES page evidences how we have explored collaborative approaches to writing with/in public space in different physical contexts, expanding our approach and practice of writing/reading through an iterative engagement beyond the specificity and singuarity of any one particular market square. The time-bound research enquiry Textorium (which is taken as the focus for this exposition) builds upon a series of parallel explorations in collaborative writing-reading with/in public space that involve some or all the five artist-writers Emma Cocker, Andrea Coyotzi Borja, Cordula Daus, Vidha Saumya, and Lena Séraphin. Whilst not the explicit focus of this exposition, the following projects indicate how the working methods and practices adopted within Textorium have both evolved and continue to evolve. The methods have been tested in the contexts of other locations and have involved other participating subjectivities.
Whilst beyond the scope of this specific exposition, we provide a LINK HERE hyperlink at the bottom of each example, for interested readers, which opens a new window in the browser providing additional details about these respective iterations, projects and practices.
TEXTORIUM (Preparatory Exploration)
21 May 2022, 12.00 noon CET
Locations: Helsinki, Sheffield, Vaasa, Vienna
Prior to working together in Vaasa and as a way of tuning in and preparing for our collaborative writing in-person, on Saturday 21 May 2022 we engaged in a shared experiment in synchronous collective writing in public space from our respective cities of Berlin, Helsinki, Sheffield, Vaasa. We engaged in a series of writing activities which were undertaken temporally synchronous (we were doing them exactly at the same time), but geographically separated. We agreed to make written observations of a public site for a time-bound period, collaborating in a shared action. We began with three 10-minute warm-ups with different foci of attention – e.g. surfaces, surfacing. From there we continued to write with attention on 'as far as the eye can see'.
Writers: Emma Cocker, Andrea Coyotzi Borja, Cordula Daus, Vidha Saumya, Lena Séraphin
LINK HERE — to engage with the scores and resulting written artefacts from this one-day shared research exploration.
Tender Dialogues: Suspending Artistic Research Writing as Meaning-Making was a 3-hour workshop which took place on 2 July 2022 within the frame of the 13th Society of Artistic Research Conference (Mend, Blend, Attend) held at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. The workshop aimed to assess artistic research writing as a practice of meaning-making by proposing the suspension of end results in favour of collaborative thought processes. The workshop explored observational writing on civic space: it consisted of conversations, readings and writings that challenged language as representation. In this 180min workshop, we tested writing in public space beginning with a prompt outlining the role of a sole writer by noting singular words about phenomena in our field of vision. From there we continued to write as a group, a collective that decided on a spatial score for the writers on site, where the observational writing is tested on behalf of bodily perception and sensation. The third prompt continued to be based on bodily awareness, but the writers now moved and wrote simultaneously in a pattern that was collectively decided on. This third writing prompt rejected naming and nouns. Each of the three writing sessions were merged with readings and discussions about the experiences of writing and the diverse textual qualities buoyed by a procedural approach. The prompts demonstrate how writing has capacities for forming affinities, how writing can be a collective attempt and therefore attend to reflective collaboration.
Initiated by Emma Cocker and Lena Séraphin.
Writers: Annette Arlander, Emma Cocker, Cordula Daus, Lena Séraphin, Niina Turtola, Andy Weir, Natalia Castilllo Rincón and Hinnerk Utermann.
LINK HERE — to engage with the scores and resulting written artefacts from this one-day shared research exploration. The exposition 'Tender Dialogues' is published in the conference proceedings for Mend, Blend, Attend.
SITE-READING – Site Specific Writing and Reading
Saturday 6 March 2021 at noon GMT
Locations: Sheffield, Vienna, Edinburgh, Berlin, Vaasa and Helsinki
Invited writers/artistic researchers are invited to make written observations of a public site for a time-bound period, collaborating in a shared action, though geographically apart. On Saturday 6 March 2021, seven writers in Sheffield, Vienna, Edinburgh, Berlin, Vaasa and Helsinki made notes in public space. We began with three 3-minute warm-ups with specified constraints that challenge writing to bridge the cerebral and corporeal — e.g. observations take list form, avoid adjectives, notate when bodily perception shifts to storytelling. From there we continued to make notes on behalf of our bodily senses for 45 minutes.
Site-Reading — Site Specific Writing and Reading was initiated by Emma Cocker and Lena Séraphin in association with writers Andrea Coyotzi Borja, Alexander Damianisch, Cordula Daus, Sepideh Karami, Vidha Saumya.
Written artefacts and findings from this enquiry were subsequently presented at 12th Society of Artistic Research Conference (Care, Dare, Share), hosted by the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (mdw), April 7–9, 2021.
LINK HERE — to engage with the scores and resulting written artefacts from this shared research exploration, as well as our SAR conference presentation. The exposition 'Site-Reading: Site Specific Reading and Writing' is published in the conference proceedings for Care, Dare, Share, 2021 [Available here].
Wording is an iteration of Writing in Public Space, an ongoing research project initiated by Lena Séraphin, and was organised as a Dispruptive Processes workshop attempting at introducing societal, communal and artistic collaboration at the Research Pavilion #3, Venice, 2019. 50 artists took part in the workshop: 16 writers notated in the square Campo de la Chiesa in Saca on the Sacca Fisola island in Venice and 34 in different locations such as Málaga in Spain, Medellín in Colombia, Arco in Italy, Greenville in North Carolina, Marksjön in Sweden, Warsaw in Poland, Baden in Germany, Castlewarren in the County of Kilkenny, Ireland, Helsinki in Finland and Houston in Texas.
The aim of this collective attempt at writing is to shape a public space using words and to position ourselves in shared spaces and reciprocated texts. Wording is a collective exercise in how we perceive while being in public space. The ambition is to study how we respond to the space and to notate what we observe. Since it is undoable to write down everything that happens in one’s surroundings, the writing becomes a series of choices. The workshop is about learning to be aware of these choices and explores if there is a possibility that the physical senses perceive in a categoric mode.
Participation could take place in any language, including made-up ones, from any public space wherever during 12-14 of June 2019. Returning to the same public place during three days in a row has a purpose. The writer not only returns to the place, but also to the text and the act of writing. In this way a relation, a dialogue, and maybe also a transformation, is formed between the elements at stake. Returning is also a tool for discovering repetitive patterns. In short, the thought is less to compare different public spaces, and more to share how we perceive what occurs during the course of three days. One of the challenges is to stay in an observational mode as the intent is to avoid story-telling, fiction writing, assumptions and opinions, and instead to stay close to observing public space by writing. One way to assume the writing is to let the bodily senses guide and inform. Another challenge is to keep the text as it is and not to revise. The aim is to give the text a quality of a carbon copy or a textual imprint of what is recognised by the senses and then transformed into words.
Wording is inspired by Georges Perec and his experimental book Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu parisien, or An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (2010). Perec observed Place Saint-Sulpice in October 1974. Writing in Public Space has on different occasions involved contributions from Emma Cocker, Andrea Coyotzi Borja, Cordula Daus, Vidha Saumya, alongside many other writers. Specifically, in 2019, Lena Séraphin, Emma Cocker, and Cordula Daus collaborated within Wording and its performative reading Re-Wording.
LINK HERE — to encounter different iterations of the research project Writing in Public Space.
READING ON READING
May — June 2019
Location: Research Pavilion #3, Venice
Reading on Reading is a series of experimental reading practices developed collaboratively by Emma Cocker, Cordula Daus and Lena Séraphin within the frame of the Research Pavilion #3, Venice, 2019, for exploring what alternative modes of sense making are produced when reading is undertaken artistically, as an aesthetic activity. Reading on Reading explores three interrelated foci: How can aesthetic practices of reading: (1) Shed new light on the phenomenology (or how-ness) of reading? (2) Transform the often-solitary activity of reading into a shared or communal act — and explore what modes of sociality, solidarity and emergent ‘we’ appear therein? (3) Operate as a disruptive process unsettling normative conventions of reading through focus on the poetic, affective and material dimensions of readerly experience? Within this artistic research collaboration, we consider the act of reading beyond the relation of the reader to a text, as a micro-political or ethico-aesthetic practice through which to re-consider — perhaps even re-organise — the relations between self and other(s), self and world. Drawing upon Félix Guattari’s notion of ecosophy with its three ecological registers of environment, social relations and human subjectivity, in this exposition we consider how the modest practice of reading together could contribute to a wider ethico-aesthetic project: for cultivating shared poetics of attention, for the re-sensing of language through embodied vocalisation, for tending to the temporary gatherings of ‘we’ that reading together affords.
LINK HERE — to engage with a research exposition that shares practices and reflections generated in-and-through this collaborative enquiry. The exposition 'Reading on Reading: Ecologies of Reading' is published in Mika Elo, Tero Heikkinen, Henk Slager, (eds.) 'Ecologies of Practice', Ruukku: Studies in Artistic Research, Issue 14, 2020. [Available here].