Research Catalogue

Reading on Reading is a series of experimental reading practices developed collaboratively by Emma Cocker, Cordula Daus and Lena Séraphin whilst working together in 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’ emerge 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 read, 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. The aim of this exposition is to share the reading practices tested and explored in and through the collaboration of three artist researchers, alongside reflection on the questions and concerns emerging within this enquiry. Whilst operating as a document or archive of a specifically time-bound research activity, the intention is that our reading practices have scope to be activated by other readers.

A practice based research on questioning.

Through Phenomena Themselves Schedule

Convocation – from com ‘with, together’ and vocare ‘to call’. We call for a gathering of language-based practices: from the wordless corporeality of body language to the virtuality of digital text, from the voicing of spoken utterance to the textility of words on a page. Textorium – a notion that etymologically pertains to weaving and braiding, the weaver and the woven. For phenomenologist Max van Manen the term refers to the writerly space of reflection, the experiential world of the text as it opens up for the receptive writer and reader. But how can the ‘taken-for-grantedness’ of language be put into question? How can language-based practices enable us to encounter ‘things’ anew? From textorium to sensorium, a reciprocal space for coming together through a material encounter with language experienced in its diversity. How do we experience language’s activity, affectivity, ambiguity, capacity, corporeality, density, elasticity, ephemerality, fluidity, fragility, illegibility, instability, intensity, inter-subjectivity, hybridity, materiality, multiplicity, musicality, occasionality, opacity, performativity, physicality, plasticity, porosity, potentiality, relationality, simultaneity, sensibility, sensitivity, sonority, spatiality, syn¬chronicity, tonality, temporality, visuality, vitality? Convocation invites exploration of the how-ness of language within practices of: Addressing | Calling | Conversing | Describing | Dialoguing | Disrupting | Drawing | Echoing | Effacing | Evoking | Fictioning | Invoking | Listening | Misunderstanding | Moving | Muting | Naming | Questioning | Reading | Redacting | Spacing | Speaking | Summoning | Transcribing | Translating | Voicing | Wording | Writing | ____ ing Convocation is a 3-day event on expanded language-based practices taking place within the frame of the Research Pavilion, Venice, 16 - 18 June 2019. Hosted by Emma Cocker, Cordula Daus and Lena Séraphin in co-operation with Alex Arteaga. A collaboration between research cells Through Phenomena Themselves, Disruptive Processes and AIRA. 16 – 18 June 2019 10.00 – 20.00 Sala del Camino + theatre, Giudecca, Venice Within the frame of the Research Pavilion http://www.researchpavilion.fi/

Conceived and co-organised by Emma Cocker, Alexander Damianisch, Cordula Daus and Lena Séraphin, this Society of Artistic Research Special Interest Group (SAR SIG) provides contexts for coming together via the exchange of language-based research. The intent is to support developments in the field of expanded language-based practices by inviting attention, time and space for enabling understanding of/and via these practices anew.

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.

Practice Sharing II is the second online presentation of diverse approaches to language-based practice within the field of artistic research, published by the Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. The Practice Sharing includes contributions from: -- Annette Arlander -- Dave Ball -- Juan Pablo Gaviria Bedoya -- Sue Brind & Jim Harold -- Katrina Brown -- Arturas Bukauskas -- Julia Calver -- Delphine Chapuis Schmitz -- Emma Cocker -- Joanna Cook -- Adélia Santos Costa -- Mike Croft -- Kimberly Campanello -- Kostas Daflos -- Cordula Daus -- Janhavi Dhamankar & Minou Tsambika Polleros -- Martin.P. Eccles -- C.C. Elian -- Federico Eisner Sagues -- João Emediato -- Kate Fahey -- Rob Flint -- Lynda Gaudreau -- Sandra Golubjevaite -- Sara Gomez -- Vanessa Graf -- Maria Hedman Hvitfeldt, Mamdooh Afdile & Alexander Skantze -- Kirsi Heimonen & Leena Rouhiainen -- rosie heinrich with An_assembling_“I” -- Steffi Hofer -- Marianne Holm Hansen -- Rolf Hughes -- James Jack -- Benjamin Jenner -- Christina Marie Jespersen -- Molly Joyce -- Krystyna Kulisiewicz -- Andrea Liu -- Ling Liu -- Barb Macek -- Yorgos Maraziotis -- Klaus Maunuksela -- Annie Morrad -- Amelie Mourgue d'Algue -- Antrianna Moutoula -- Peta Murray -- Elena Peytchinska & Thomas Ballhausen -- Julieanna Preston -- Maya Rasker -- Sarah Rinderer -- Hanns Holger Rutz -- Maryam Ramezankhani --- Marianna Stefanitsi -- Anie Toole -- Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec -- Sarah Scaife -- Litó Walkey -- Kai Ziegner -- Practice Sharing II is co-edited by Emma Cocker, Cordula Daus and Lena Séraphin. Designed + compiled by Emma Cocker. For more on the Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group (SAR SIG) for Language-based Artistic research see here - https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/835089/835129

Transitory Writing in No One's Land (Granada April 2024)