TEXTORIUM: Collaborative Writing-Reading with/in Public Space
(2023)
author(s): Emma Cocker, Andrea Coyotzi Borja, Cordula Daus, Lena Séraphin, Vidha Saumya
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
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.
SELF as OTHER, or: Speaking aut*
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Brab, Annan
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
We, Anna N. and Barb/Brab, started an exchange of thoughts about the meaning of "aut" – as in aut/istic and aut/oimmune.
We are interested in what it means to live as auts, to write about it in regard to everydaily life, in regard to the medical discourses about autism and autoimmunity, and in regard to the view of the "others", the not-auts.
In the context of language-based artistic research we seek to develop practices that allow for investigating the meaning of aut on different levels of our existence.
* (Speaking out and at the same time speaking as auts, but also speaking in a language called "aut")
Dorsal Practices
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Emma Cocker, Katrina Brown
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Dorsal Practices is a collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer-artist Emma Cocker, for exploring the notion of dorsality in relation to how we as moving bodies orient to self, others, world. How does the cultivation of a back-oriented awareness and attitude shape and inform our experience of being-in-the-world? A dorsal orientation foregrounds an active letting go, releasing, even de-privileging, of predominant social habits of uprightness and frontality — the head-oriented, sight-oriented, forward-facing, future-leaning tendencies of a culture intent on grasping a sense of the world through naming and control. Rather than a mode of withdrawal, of turning one’s back, how might a back-leaning orientation support a more open and receptive ethics of relation? How are experiences of listening, voicing, thinking, shaped differently through this tilt of awareness and attention towards the back?
Dorsal Practices — Towards a Back-Oriented Being-in-the-World
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Emma Cocker, Katrina Brown
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This exposition forms part of a journal article, Katrina Brown and Emma Cocker, 'Dorsal Practices — Towards a Back-Oriented Being-in-the-World’, in Tara Page (ed.) With–In Bodies: Research Assemblages of the Sensory and the Embodied, Special Issue of Humanities 2024, 13, 63. https://doi.org/10.3390/h13020063
The article itself can be found here - https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/13/2/63