dorsal practices [re-turning]
(2025)
author(s): Emma Cocker, Katrina Brown
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
This exposition comprises textual fragments (both written and voiced) produced through the act of returning to (in turn re-activating, re-configuring, even re-imagining) conversational transcripts generated within the artistic research project Dorsal Practices, a collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer-artist Emma Cocker. Initiated in January 2021, Dorsal Practices is an artistic collaboration for exploring how the cultivation of a back-oriented awareness and attitude might shape and inform our embodied, affective and relational experience of being-in-the-world. Conceived at the threshold between choreographic-movement practices and language-based artistic research, Dorsal Practices explores how the experiences of listening, languaging, even thinking, might be shaped differently through this embodied tilt of awareness and attention towards the back, moreover, through a practice of coming back, the act of (re)turning. The original transcript material that forms the basis of this exposition was produced through a practice of conversation undertaken within six interrelated blocks of exploration, taking place over 18 months between October 2022 and February 2024. Within this period of enquiry, we — Brown and Cocker — focused our attention on the act of returning within our shared practice, re-imagined as a "dorsal turn". Through the intermingling of two registers of language-based practice, that is, through the performativity of both the written and spoken texts themselves, within this exposition we attempt to make tangible how the dorsal gesture of the turn and the circling principle of re- become operative as a spinal thread within our shared enquiry. Deviating from the straightforwardness of a strictly linear text, we invite a form of dorsal listening-reading that might engage through loops and returns. We conceive the research artefacts generated through the practice itself as the central focus within this exposition, alongside a supporting text where we introduce the wider enquiry of Dorsal Practices, reflecting on how we conceive the act of turning and of re-turning therein.
Soft letting of language — Listening for emergent wor(l)ds
(2025)
author(s): Emma Cocker
published in: Research Catalogue
My presentation for Listen for Beginnings drew on a number of recent collaborations to explore how the ethico-aesthetic practice of listening (and being listened to) has increasingly become a vital thread within my enquiry. The performativity of my presentation involved weaving between different research artefacts and materials generated in and through artistic collaboration (including video and transcript extracts), alongside "thinking with" a wider critical-contextual milieu (specifically the writing of thinkers such as Gemma Corradi Fiumara and Lispeth Lipari) to consider the relational and ethical ramifications of a listening attitude. I explored how forms of languaging developed through listening might in turn call for different kinds of reception (alternative ways of listening and reading), alongside proposing how a ‘listening stance’ might inform an approach to collaboration — collaboration conceived as a mode of in-touch-ness that also allows for adjacency and alongside-ness, for indirectness and obliqueness, for the reciprocity of listening and being listened to. Within this published context, I want to allow a ‘breathing space’ (perhaps even a ‘listening space’) for selected fragments of an emergent vocabulary of/through listening generated from within a process of collaborative research. My paper comprises extracts of conversational transcript from three different collaborative projects where an immanent and reflexive language for attesting to the qualities and conditions of listening emerges in and through a language-based practice that is itself imbued with a listening attitude — one that involves listening to oneself, listening to others, listening for emergent wor(l)ds. The textual extracts have been generated largely through a practice of conversation and/or the experimental reading of conversational transcripts within the following projects: I – “Dorsal Practices” is an artistic research collaboration with Katrina Brown for exploring how a back-oriented awareness and attitude might shape and inform our embodied, affective and relational experience of being-in-the-world; II — “thinking aesthetic thinking through aesthetic research practices” is an artistic research project involving Alex Arteaga, Emma Cocker, Nicole Wendel (with Sabine Zahn in the first phase) that focuses on ways in which aesthetic research practices enable and realise a specific form of thinking: aesthetic thinking; III — “The Appearance of the More” is an artistic research collaboration with Nicole Wendel for bringing-into-relation the unfolding, embodied processes of drawing and languaging as resonating fields of perception and cooperation.
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.
Dorsal Practices: Vibrating with the Hum of the World
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Emma Cocker
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This exposition presents recordings of a live improvisatory performative reading practice activated as part of the artistic research project Dorsal Practices, a collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer-artist Emma Cocker. This performative reading practice was activated as a way of generating the textual component of a journal article by Brown and Cocker entitled 'Dorsal Practices — Vibrating with the Hum of the World', submitted to the Special Issue ‘On Landscape’, Performance Research Journal. The article itself is comprised of textual fragments that have been distilled from the transcript of this reading practice.
Dorsal Practices
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Emma Cocker, Katrina Brown
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Initiated in 2020, 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?
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 — 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
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")open exposition comments (0)