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Practice Sharing is an online context for creating connections between artist-researchers, and for identifying different approaches to language-based practice within the field of artistic research. Artist-researchers are invited to share examples of their own language-based artistic research — focusing on specific ‘practices’ (in other words, specific processes, approaches or methods; ways of working, constellations of activity or framing patterns, particular projects or lines of enquiry-in-practice). The intent is not to define or fix what language-based artistic research is but rather to reflect how it is practised in its diversity.* See 'call' for contributions. 

The focus on language within artistic research is considered from a broad and transforming perspective to include diverse fields such as visual arts, performance, film, theatre, music, choreography as well as literature; where language-based practices might include (as well as move beyond) different approaches to writing, reading, speaking, listening. 

* Whilst the aspiration is to be truly open to the diversity of artistic researchers working with language-based practices, submissions that are in any way discriminatory will not be accepted.

Lena Séraphin <

My current research interest is collaborative writing. It has been inspired by a book, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, that Georges Perec wrote in 1974 by making observations on Place St-Sulpice in Paris. The aim is to replay this writing experiment within a group and to engage with the result, namely a multitude of observations stemming from intersecting perspectives. At this point in summer 2020, I am looking at works from the 70’s that engage with non-fictional approaches, such as Chantal Akermans shortfilm La Chambre. It is intriguing how a non-fictional approach results in (technical) choices such as real time editing, breaking the fourth wall and the film camera moving 360°. In a similar line I have an interest in observational writing, and diverse restrictive writing assignments that evade fiction. It is impossible to notate everything that is happening in a public space, and another issue that interests me is the liminal aspect of descriptive text and what then replaces a failing medium. One tentative function of Perec’s writing experiment might have been a kind of re-instalment of the everyday in Cold War Europe. What could this intent be today, and might it become a re-enactment of the everyday? In my doctoral thesis issues of fictional potentialities are discussed, especially in contact with controlling master narratives, and I think what I am trying to express here is if fictional potentials or fictioning could be an option when realities are falling through. 

Inspired by Georges Perec and his experimental book An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris from 1975 nine artists were brought together in Ekenäs, Finland, for three days in August, 2017, to make notes while on the town square. These notes have subsequently been compiled into a kind of written index of the square Rådhustorget. The aim of this attempt at writing is to try to give shape to a public space using words, and to situate ourselves in reciprocal text.

Perec observed Place Saint-Sulpice from a singular perspective, but the book Omspelning-Replay-Uusintaotto-Repetición shows how a group of writers perceived a public place from different viewpoints. Our notes are paralleled so that they follow a common time scale, instead of being presented linearly one after the other. Time plays a pivotal role and influences the editing of the manuscripts into a book of intertwined spacial perspectives. 

Perec’s idea was to pay attention to the seemingly insignificant, and to notate what is taking place when nothing special is happening. In the replay nine individual sets of notes are woven into one multilingual text. In this way there's a turn from written observations to a textorium of perspectives.

The writers are: Hami Bahadori, Moa Franzén, Ulrika Gomm, Minna Heikinaho, Behzad Khosravi Noori, Joanne Lee, Jaime Mena de Torres, Pia Sandström, and Lena Séraphin. Graphic design by Jonas Williamsson. Curated by Juha-Heikki Tihinen and produced by Pro Artibus Foundation.

Link to book and publications on collaborative writing:

https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/708123/845743/100/150

Omspelning-Replay-Uusintaotto-Repetición <

Credit: Cover design by Jonas Williamsson. 

Conversation as Material <

Close Reading <

Emma Cocker <

My enquiry unfolds restlessly along the margins of writing/art, including experimental, performative and collaborative approaches to working with and through language, using a matrix of writing, reading and speaking practices. My ongoing research interests focus on the visual and physical materiality of language (see Close Reading below); on the 'poetics of attention' within the act of reading (See Reading on Reading), alongside how to write from within or through practice (indeed, how writing / reading /speaking can be conceived as aesthetic research practices). How can writing operate as a poetic-aesthetic practice that embodies or activates rather than describes? How does one attend to the wrestle of writing’s incipience, where content is not already known in advance, but rather emerges synchronous and in fidelity to the experience that it seeks to articulate? Writing is thus conceived as a necessarily uncertain practice, that emerges through receptivity to, even through the nurturing of, the experience of not knowing, in the absence of a clear or definitive plan.

Writing-in-relation, writing from the position of inter- (both with and within) — writing with and against the resistance of the situation, of the page, of the body, writing dialogically with others. My practice often involves collaboration with other artist-researchers using a practice called ‘conversation as material’ (see below) or through what I am calling ‘contiguous writing’ — a mode of creative-critical prose that touches upon rather than being explicitly about. My wider research focuses on practices that are alert and attentive to the live circumstances — or occasionality — of their own unfolding, where thinking-in-action is immanent to the doing, not a knowing in advance but rather thinking en acte. See not-yet-there.blogspot.com

Conversation-as-material is a practice of ‘writing without writing’ developed by writer-artist Emma Cocker initially through a series of artistic research collaborations including Re—  (with Rachel Lois Clapham); The Italic I  (with Clare Thornton) and Choreographic Figures: Deviations from the Line  (with Nikolaus Gansterer and Mariella Greil). Within this approach, conversational dialogue is conceived not as a means for reflecting on or about practice but  as a generative practice in-and-of-itself, site and material for the construction of inter-subjective and immanent modes of linguistic ‘sense-making’ emerging from the enmeshing of different voices in live exchange. Conversation-as-material involves the quest for a not-yet-known vocabulary emerging synchronous to the live circumstances that it seeks to articulate. Here, meaning does not exist prior to utterance but rather is co-produced through the dialogic process itself, with recorded dialogue transcribed and then distilled to reveal an emergent infra-personal textual poetics.

In the live-ness of conversation, words can often slip and spill into existence; thought conjured in the event of its utterance, verbalised at the point of thinking leaning into the unknown. This practice strives for a condition of exhaustion and elasticity in word and thought, stepping off or away from the stability of fixed subject positions towards the fluid process of co-production. An intersubjective — even infrasubjective vocabulary — emerges only after what one wanted to say has been exhausted or used up. A way of 'writing without writing' where the cadence or rhythmic pacing of conversation — its pitch and intonation, the tempo of speech — often differs from written writing. Excited acceleration. Hesitation. Deliberation. Syncopation. Abbreviation. Words dropped. Omissions. Repetitions. Sentence incompletion. Disregard for punctuation. Hurried utterance. Syllabic glides and slurs.

More on Conversation as Material

See examples

Credit: Emma Cocker and Rachel Lois Clapham, Re- (Performance script/document), 2012.

Close Reading is an ongoing constellation of explorations (2011 >) by Emma Cocker, which plays on the practice of 'close reading' or of 'explication de texte' as a critical tool for destabilising the linear unfolding of a text into discontinuous fragments. Like conventional forms of close reading, this work focuses on paying attention to individual words and the order in which sentences and ideas unfold as they are read or presented, drawing on the Latin origins of the word explicare which means to unfold, to fold out, to set forth. However, critical attention is not paid to the meaning of words themselves as signs, but to those other meanings produced by looking at the materiality of words 'close up', by applying close visual attention to language, through processes of visual magnification or microscopic observation. Close Reading investigates how paying close attention to language does not always fix or clarify a single, stable meaning, but perhaps counter-intuitively produces further uncertainty, indeterminacy and formlessness. Here, the more something becomes scrutinised the less it becomes known. This research enquiry is concerned with pushing or pressuring language beyond the regime of signification, in order to explore the affective and asignifying potential — or perhaps even poetics — of textual fragments.

More on Close Reading

Semi-fictional writing <