Re-turning as a 'circulating practice' — How to re-turn to our experience of writing-reading together, as a collaborative practice in-and-of itself? How to re-turn to the artefacts, memories, reflections, experiences generated by the score/prompt What is Agreed Upon? We agreed to take some time to re-turn to the materials that we had generated in relation to the score What is Agreed Upon?, whilst also trying to bring to mind again the experience of writing together in the square. We came together online on ZOOM [07 FEBRUARY 2023] to practice re-turning together.
RE-READING PRACTICE (SEE zoom recording RIGHT)
We each took turns to read aloud a section of the text that we each had generated in response to the score/prompt What is Agreed Upon? It could be a fragment or a section or a longer length of the text. We continued going around the circle until everyone has read aloud their full text. How was the new ‘sense’ or meanings emerging in the meeting of fragments, and the sense of space-time that emerges therein? How could reading together operate as a way of re-turning to, and revisiting the practice and site of the square.
SPEAKING CIRCLE — A CONVERSATION
We then each took turns to speak/reflect in relation to the score/texts/experience of What is Agreed Upon? The ‘Speaking Circle’ adapts a model based on Nancy Kline’s ‘thinking environment’ or ‘time to think’ approach, where individuals are provided a period of time of uninterrupted time for thinking-speaking.1 It was possible to stay silent, to pause, to speak single words or fragments, to use more than one language. We activated three ‘circles’ or ‘rounds’ where in each round we had 5 minutes thinking-speaking time.
1. See Nancy Kline, Time to Think: Listening to Ignite the Human Mind, (London: Cassell, 1999).
BELOW: We present a reworked transcript from the Speaking Circle (A conversation) as a further attempt to explore way of collaborative writing. We have highlighted sections of the transcript (which feel pertinent to both our own enquiry and the notion of 'circulating practices' more broadly), and redacted out other parts (that felt tangential).
ABOVE: Recording of our zoom-based Reading Practice. Click to play. Double click to open full screen.
I am first Thinking about this confusion — finding a place to write. How do I write?
And where do I write? Sitting on the floor. Kneeling. Choosing a bench. But then, with every bench or object you are already in a certain confined, prescriptive perspective.
Making an inventory, an impossible inventory of the square. The illusion of index, of a summary, of the possibility to summarise a place. And then, the necessity and the doubt of how to name something. And by naming, retroactively summoning this thing that now reappears in word form.
Note-worthy elements and the doubt about what is note-worthy at all. And temporal fixations on one thing or situation, that then become word objects. Common denominators in all the three, four — how many are we — texts. For example, that LCD screen, that noisy LCD screen, like a pull of attraction, the gravitation of all writers towards that … some writers towards that object. OK, I am now trying To reflect on the score —, general reflections on the score: What is Agreed Upon? This score seems to be — more than the others — triggering the form of a question. And the question, that by inviting questioning, one propels oneself forward. The questioning as a form, like throwing a ball and trying to run after it, trying to catch it by running forward. It is not finding an answer but rather sending out something, to be driven by a question, a doubt. Not answering, testing, tasting through questioning, maybe. Then, I was thinking of what of the returning, returning to the situation of writing in the square.
How the presence of the others gives sense and stabilises this fundamental insecurity or not knowing, the subjectedness to the square. It is like through seeing or feeling or looking back at the group that one becomes certain that this is what we are doing now, and that this is where the others are as well, although they might be somewhere else. And then
There is something very amazing about the synchronicity of doing something at the same time.
Yes, I am trying to take myself to being in the square and I was looking in my notebooks, and I am surprised that there are no reflections or no notes in my notebooks other than the writing that we made. So it was like the writing contained the reflection of the experience itself.
And I noticed that there was this shift or this shimmer between ‘what is agreed upon’ and ‘what do we agree upon’. So this ‘we’ kept shimmering in and out. Maybe even this ‘we’ is implicit in the sense of ‘what is agreed upon’. So there is something about this ‘we’ and ‘agreement’ that I became interested in.
But then if I think back to the experience of us being in the square and us coming together as a group or as a collective or even describing ourselves in terms of collaboration, of collaborative writing, I was also struck in a sense by how little we had agreed upon in advance, particularly in terms of a vocalised agreement, or an explicit agreement about what it was that we were doing and how we were going to do. So I was thinking about this sense of who, when, where, what, why and how. And some of those parameters felt agreed upon.
The sense of ‘where’ was agreed upon — there was an attempt to demarcate a kind of square or space, to set a limitation around the parameters of where we were working, so some kind of spatial agreement of a terrain of practice.
And there was a temporal contour, a time score, or a time period when we were going to write together. And to a certain extent there was this ‘who’, this group of us that was agreed upon — five writers coming together. But actually those categories became very porous, particularly I think this sense of ‘who’, this edge between ‘us’ as the group and the wider communities of the square. At times, other individuals somehow were becoming drawn into our shared activity; at times, I think, other individuals were almost being excluded from it. So, this sense of ‘we’ and ‘they’ and inclusion and exclusion — it was not agreed upon, but at times it started to stabilise. This thing that you were saying about temporary fixations, I think that there was this sense of temporal fixations of inclusions and exclusions.
I think I was shocked in some ways by how much our quiet, quite still, gesture of writing intervened in the square. How much it interrupted some of the other rhythms and flows and patterns and habits of that particular space. How being still and being really immersed in something had the capacity to disrupt a certain kind of practice of the square, to interrupt a particular kind of rhythm, to call attention even though it was very slight, almost so invisible.
We called attention; we were noticed; we were very visible in our very slight action, and I guess in that sense, positively there was something about creating this shared space of attention. It was not so much that we were collaboratively writing in the sense of producing writing together, agreeing on the writing, but agreeing to create conditions of attention, of observation.
I think something about agreement as a commitment, yes, committing.
When I listen to the texts read today, I was quite intrigued by the time frame for writing because I remember that the score for What is Agreed Upon? was 30 minutes in the very first morning of writing in May last year. And now when I had the possibility to again dwell in this moment — how many months away May 2022 from now, over half a year away — it was like returning to a certain time like a fictional revisit of a time by listening to you and your perceptual observations of the square. And I anew found a way of finding pockets in time, or a certain sequence, sometimes even something interwoven of sharing those 30 minutes, and that we each found our minutes and seconds and pockets of time within that timeframe.
And of course, that brings my thoughts to whenever we cross, I cross, a public square, today, how the time that we spend in public spaces are affecting each other without us contemplating more on that. I also quite like that What is Agreed Upon? was the very first score because in a way it is quite an abstract score. Because we have also been working with quite precise scores, saying more exactly what to look at, what to sense, what to perceive and what to write. And I thought it was a very good beginning for the writing that we had together, to have this abstract beginning, and really kind of tasting the words, What is Agreed Upon. And I still think very openly on that —Maybe we agreed to committing the time together, it could be said that was agreed upon. And I also feel it is good to think that this score came in my mind because two three weeks before the writing week I was in a seminar at the Science University together with Neli Dobreva who is a philosopher in Arts. And to the group, the group of listeners, we were speaking about public space, and from my point of view as an artist, I was speaking about the practice of writing in public space, the collective practice. And, I found that in many ways the group could not see that as a defined practice — it was too open. So the question, ‘what is agreed upon?’ came from one of the participants who was slightly frustrated and wanted to pin down, but what did you really agreed upon when you met. So there is slippages of different places and different events that come together, so in a way that seminar in the philosophy department was taken as an open question and brought into our practice of writing together, and again was met in a public space. And maybe then by committing, or by being there. I am also thinking here of languages, and multi-lingual experiences. Listening to everyone read, the first score, or listening to what people had written in response to the first score — a few things stood out for me. One was the temperature of that place, it could also be because I had made a note of temperature, but in Emma’s text also there was a mention of the temperature.
So it immediately brought to mind the sensation that was there when I was writing and when we were gathering in that space. But in a way, going through the various, in a way, the details that stand out, it is almost like a series of punctuation marks where the sentence is not as important as much as the pauses in between.
And I was thinking in a way, very similarly to what Lena just described, about fictional revisit. Because it really felt like a fog of visuals, I could not clearly place any of the visuals, but it was all like one assembly of all these observations. It made me think about how we also remember a space, although the reading right now was not remembering, but relooking at what we had observed at that time, or seen at that time, or made a note. I also think about language quite a bit in this because writing in English, even though it is a working language for me, I often find that the word that I am looking for is not in my vocabulary. And I am looking for that word which is going to describe it but it, yes, I don’t know those words. So it also makes me feel at times, fairly limited in my capacity to write in English. But not limited in the sense that it makes me think that it is restrictive, but it makes me feel that I am using, I am using words with a certain economy, a limited palette of sorts. So, there is a certain enjoyment in that, because the same words can mean different things just based on how I am putting them in a certain sequence.
Another thing that strikes me is the description of movement when we were all reading one after another, I could visualise in a way different parts of the square. And thinking of this movement alongside the movement of people who were present, or who were passing in the square. I think also the various intentions in which, with which one is present in the square — so the five of us being present with a very particular intention of observing. So it is almost like we are holding the entirety of the market square under a kind of, not a microscope, we are not looking at it in detail, but as if we have been able to grasp the entirety of it. So there is a kind of ambition which I find quite humorous in this activity because it feels like it can, yes, it can encapsulate everything, even though you are observing just a part of it. Yes, I have a friend that calls me in Spanish, cachibachera, it is a funny term, I have struggle on how to translate it. But it would be something like a sentimental hoarder of sorts. Although I wouldn’t call myself a hoarder, because I wouldn’t consider collecting, not even collecting but taking some objects, as hoarding. But then again, that is what a hoarder would say. When we were in the square, at some point I was near the trees and I noticed at some point, inside the cage that the trees have, this metal circle which protects, “protects” the trees, each one had one rock which made me think that they were there for some reason. Maybe, I remember there was a food-cart there where he had a rock and he had tied a knot — it had a purpose. But these ones were just there, waiting for their use. And one of them was a cobble stone. So, I don’t think that the city would agree, or I don’t know what the agreement is on taking rocks within the city, but I decided to take this cobble stone, that I have with me. And I am not sure, I think some of you have seen it, or maybe I showed it at some point, but I thought I would describe it now. Because I have it with me — I feel it is somehow part of the square although it doesn’t feel like it. It is a struggle between taking it from there and imagining — it was similar to the ones that were in the square, but since it is a cube it is also difficult to see it as a cobble stone. Because they are usually flat, and
This is a thing — a very heavy thing actually. It is a fairly regular cube, regular because it has six sides, but the lines are very irregular. And the surface of each side is definitely very irregular. When you move the square you can see some kind of spots or glitter-effect dots. I have no idea what kind of rock it is, but I can see three different colours, or four. Like a light-grey, middle-grey, dark-grey and a brownish one. I think that the brownish is the one that you see the most. There is one of the sides that seems to be polished, so I wonder what is up with that. And there is one corner of the cube that is missing or a little bit not-cornery, and I have no idea how to calculate weight but if I would bet, it is definitely heavier than a litre of milk, three litres of milk, oat-milk. And then, when you see it from above it is difficult to see it as a cobble stone still, because the cobble stones always seem to be kind of more polished and more flat, more used I guess. I do not know what a sentimental hoarder does but it is interesting — I thought of the cobble stone like a relic, like someone is trying to, yes, overcome the limits of the words, and say, hey, this is the square at its essence. I also had to remember that we delineated, there was this question of where does the square start and where does it end, and the cobblestones were somehow the limits of that body of the square. Now that we are speaking, yes, it resonates with me, the enjoyment of the restriction when one cannot find the word so clear. First of all the task is enormous and anyways one’s language is — and the perspective is — always partial. The words are never enough, the words anyways cannot touch what is there. So there is a certain humour that comes through the activity of trying to, yes, to summarise. It is a little bit like a God-like activity. I had to think of all scores that we hadn’t spoken about, but that were there. A lot of things we hadn’t agreed upon but a lot of things I think we had agreed upon without really stating. For example, I think we had once said that observation is the modus operandi. And here it is interesting to think about what happens to the self, and there was also a certain agreement, I think, about a style. So when I spoke about ‘there shall be’ this and that, I almost felt that I was doing something forbidden when I was writing, that I shouldn’t do that, because it ‘just observe’, and not to put myself into this, yes, exactly, fiction is ‘forbidden’. And that is so interesting — where does something that is meant to just be observational turn into something fictional. Where are these sliding, gliding moments. So when I say ‘there shall be’, I was putting myself almost into the perspective of someone who plays with a toy train and landscape, and puts objects onto the table — and says ‘there shall be an e-scooter’ and ‘there shall be a screen’ and stuff.
I also felt that movement in Vidha’s text, where she gets attracted to something very, very, concrete. And she speaks about natural things like tulips wilting, and then turns to human actions. So natural and cultural processes get blurred and there is humour in the attempt to see that as an agreement. Yes, someone agrees that there will be death, that there shall be dying — I cannot express it in better words. So for me, it would be interesting to speak about what have been the unspoken agreements that were there, and also to speak about the openness as an actual potential of this score. Because I do agree with you, Lena and Emma, that there was something very radical in not fixing, not fixing, not totally fixing the activity, and needing to doubt, needing to put into question the very score itself. As if, yes, it is something that art always does, that it undermines itself, or it allows one to think of the very conditions that one is speaking from. So, yes, now I have mentioned different topics — the self versus … in the activity of writing … and the, yes, ah, my time ends. Yes, There are so many threads emerging that I am not quite sure where to follow. Maybe this idea of circulation is there in all these threads of observation and remarks. I suppose I want to think again about this sense of commitment, or of making a commitment, and in particular, making a commitment to something that feels very open-ended. And what it feels, or how it feels, to make a commitment to this open-ended, uninvited, even unsanctioned kind of writing practice, in public, in a public space where, in some senses, it was very observable that there were certain patterns of behaviour that were more regular or repeated within the square — groups of people sitting, people by the bus stops, passers-by crossing the edges of the square, but always this sense of the centre being empty.
And, yes, this making of an agreement, even a contract, an unspoken contract between ourselves, to commit our time and focus and attention to doing something that was not needed in some ways, or had no purpose or was open or was very much about in a way, the bringing of attention, a particular kind of attention, that I think for me, writing really enables. Yes, writing enables a particular kind of attention that is different from only observing, I think, for me at least. Yes, maybe this is interesting — what is it that writing enables as a form of attention? Maybe it is something to do with the complexity of it. I was thinking about that part in your text, Andrea, where you were talking about the hand and the pen and the paper, and the complex manoeuvre of writing, between in a way this sense of interiority and the exteriority of what is observed. And the tactility of the paper and the pen or the pencil. It is a complex operation that involves many different agencies in fact. And maybe that complexity of such a simple act, sharpens attention in a particular way.
But there was also something about resistance — disagreement in fact — that doing something like writing, engaging in something like writing in a space where writing is not normally happening, there is something about disagreement or resistance, or rupture or interruption, that we are bringing about. So on the one hand, commitment and agreement within our own, commitment to one another, but also disagreeing, intervening in the conventions and habits and the rhythms of the space itself. So something about the commitment to be there together, to spend time together, bringing attention, and I think that there is something about the tangibility of that. What it is to really be with others who are really bringing their attention to something. So there was something that was secret about the content of what you were each doing, I could not know what you were writing, but I knew that you were bringing a certain quality of attention. And that feels textured, there is a thickness to that attention, in a way, that felt very tangible in the space, a thickness of the attention.
But maybe there is also something about language and habits, and maybe my own interest in trying to avoid certain habits, but certain habits necessarily being there in languaging. In writing, and writing in my mother tongue, in English, those habits are harder to avoid in a sense. I am thinking about what writing enables and how writing in a public space is about rendering a place by words, in text, and the impossibilities of doing it, and by still doing it maybe there is a new thing, a new dimension being somehow underlined. And I quite like in a way this impossibility, you spoke Vidha and Cordula about the humorous, we are there, we are now somehow doing perceptual and sensorial observations of the market square and trying to notate that by pen and paper. And then the humorous aspect of that in a way, I don’t know, I think you said, being like God, or being like a puppet master, that we could somehow be there and be able to describe everything but then, at the end of the day, when writing, I am always too late. That what I am writing about already happened when I am writing about it, and of course, most of the things are left completely unwritten when doing that. And I think that there something about that — like engaging in an activity that is seemingly impossible, but still doing it, I mean, that is resistance. Doing something that is impossible, but still doing it. And I guess I am also thinking about the mode of doing it, because in a way writing is something active — you stay somewhere and you write on the market square and you choose your place and what you observe, but on the large picture there is a certain passiveness to that because you stay still and you don’t speak. And you don’t in a way exaggerate your writing, you are, so to say, only doing the writing. And I like that thing about what is active and what is passive — because we are so much speaking about agency being the place of having the power of doing something, and it is a very active quality. But doing the writing in a public site is quite different because the agency is also not tuned down, but it has a very different feel to it — because it is active and passive. and also somehow quite reactive. So it is not a constant quality — like now I am writing with the same kind of quality for the full score of What is Agreed Upon?. Of course, my interests change and there is a certain fluctuation that is continually affecting it, and I write in a different way and my concentration is very different. And there is something that I am really intrigued by in that — that the way that I write during the same score is still very different, because so many things happen and pull my attention, or then there are clear moments when I totally fall out of concentration.
I was also thinking about, you know, the thing about in a way, one unspoken agreement has been, and this has been very much according to the, to the inspirational qualities of Georges Perec and his book, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris from 1974, and how his attempt is to avoid fiction and to pay attention to the everyday or to the infra-ordinary as he says. When you try to be somewhere, be on the square, and do observations but avoid fiction, there are so many like small gates or ports or doors into how now my association starts to get mixed up with my observation. There are so many doors for starting, to fictioning, whatever I observe. Maybe that is also something that triggers the concentration because there is a movement, you know, in the mind of the writer. Am I observing, am I fictioning, and in a way this crazy thing of you are not over concentrating on yourself but you feel the flow between things. Sometimes, you know in a way, I needed to grasp myself.
Through the various scores, I think about, or I am excited about the spontaneity of it, and even though it is a pre-decided agreement, or it is agreed upon that we are going to be in the square and we are going to write about it, I can’t seem to stop rationalising or trying to find a theory within this way of doing something — taking time collectively and yet individually to observe a particular location which is common. But within that everybody is looking at different aspects and also coming to it from various other location — cultural, geographical, locations of language, locations of ways of expressing and observing as well.
And I am constantly — through the process of writing and even right now listening to, listening to all of you — really trying to understand, what is it doing. I don’t have any answers for it — this activity by itself is enjoyable because it is giving something the benefit of time which is, which is rare in a way.
And, yes, this kind of, I am intrigued also by this sense of commitment to an activity, repeating it for a certain number of days, looking at it now after many months have past — what is it that we are doing? And how long, or how does it stay present in our mind? Does the writing during a particular time affect how we observe things thereafter? Does writing and listening to other people observe something affect our way of being in a space, inhabiting a space, thinking about spaces, the ability to move around — what does that mean?
Or is this an activity that can be carried out anywhere else in the world, and if it was, what would be the different ways of mapping in a way? Although I find mapping a word that is quite limiting in a way, it is bent on a certain common understanding of coordinates through which everybody else can understand, understand information about a given space or a location.
So, yes, all these ideas also flow in my mind continuously and within that when I am pausing in a way to write based on a certain score or based on a certain prompt, sometimes it feels like I am still not being able to completely attend to all these questions that are flowing, almost like the movement of people within the square where they are moving, going about, doing their own thing, and in that I have chosen to stay, stand still or at least move with the intention of just being located there, even though the dimensions of the square are much larger, but it feels like there is a certain narrowing down of where I can be and from where I can write. So apart from the enjoyment of the observation and perhaps trying to bring some words into it — again as I said earlier feeling a bit limited by that, by language, to express what one is observing — and how to simultaneously experience being in the space, and observing something. I think it constantly creates this dialogue through which no coherence is found. It is really like two people talking about two different things. So sometimes when I am writing my state of mind is very much like that. It is always, I enjoy thinking about all of this and I always have the feeling that there are so many directions and things that pull me. Like trying to focus my attention on the different things we have been speaking about and thinking about — it feels like being in the market, you can make any combination and get a different dish. So it is a bit of a choosing, a choosing game of where to go.
But I was thinking about the writing and the act of writing, and something that Lena was saying, I am not sure, I cannot remember how you said it, but it made me think about how it always felt when writing in the square or in general when writing, that it constantly goes, like I constantly disappear and appear again.
When I focus on what is happening on the square or when I try to observe or innumerate things, when I focus my attention on something, I am gone. But then the awareness comes back to my body that I am there — because of the weather, or because we move, or because the time is up. It is like coming back, coming back again to the body. So it is a funny feeling of being and not being when writing, or being and being something else when writing. And also I remember Vidha was mentioning the images that come, that when we were reading there are these images that are appearing. It is funny because when I think of the square it is always cloudy — we have been there on sunny days, but for some reason it is always cloudy and windy, which is a funny feeling to feel attached to something that in the first instance might seem not pleasant because of the weather. Because that square is peculiar, but there is attachment, or at least on my side I feel it like that.
I was also thinking about the doing of this writing and the agreement, and when I think of the agreement I think there is a starting agreement and then everything can go everywhere. And the agreement is perhaps that there is that, the agreement is to start and to meet and to write or even to not write — but there is like there is just a door and the agreement is to open it and after that is agreed, everything is valid, every path can be followed. And I was also thinking about this word, that when I think about Perec and the infra-ordinary and pursuing these things that sometimes they seem (not writing, because I don’t think this of writing), many things in the everyday that seem futile or that like they are not magnanimous, but they are meaningful — the word is quixotic. It is something unpredictable and sometimes it is foolishly impractical, but it has to do with the romantic idea of something being something. But at the same it, since it is maybe romanticised, or thought that it is romanticised because maybe it is not, it is taken into another lane of what matters. But at least for me, all these things matter, a lot. It is a funny thing of being and not being in writing. — thank you for that sentence. And
also
thank you Lena for reminding me of Why did we agree upon no fiction? And I guess that this also relates to the commitment of being there, of radical presence. Of being present in the same space, doing at the same time. And, yes, there is a radicality to it — if I was to see you doing this, because I think right now for other reasons, this becomes almost politically relevant, because there are so many portals or actions or things that someone could flee into. And this score or this action that we have agreed upon, it in a way, the call for no fiction says ‘stay here’, deal with that reality, deal with the almost not graspable. And it is true — there is an insistence or a resistance in this. Yes, Lena, you spoke about the puppet master, and I noted down the words that I can understand, the Swedish words, and fågel perspective was a word I can understand, the bird perspective. So I think it also relates to the fantasy — you always come too late — but there is a fantasy of scripting what happens. There is a conceptual film by a filmmaker whose name I don’t remember but I also have a friend who did a work that basically — where someone was looking out of the window and doing a voiceover of what the people were doing on a market place, and it seemed that the person was giving commands to the people, so that they were reacting to his score. Yes, I want to talk about an interest that I have that also relates to that synchronicity or writing at the same time, and I think it has to do with the fascination to do with being or feeling as if one could inhabit the other person’s mind while being on the same track, like how does this person now deal with that task. In a way — and maybe it is just a fantasy — it feels as if I could understand the processor of that person, to use a mechanic or computer analogy. How do each of us process the immediate environment that surrounds us? What happens in this process of thinking-writing-sensing? So I was doing a little exercise and I was writing down notes for each of you, reading your texts and now listening to you they came to my mind. In Emma, I feel that the way that you think and write, is that I can really follow the thought, you really take me with you — there is, There are words that lead to other words and it is easy to follow. And it is almost as if I could read your thoughts, and I have been thinking a lot about what does one write down, and is there a difference between thinking and writing. And I also, in Andrea, there is a description of a situation, a bodily attention to something, and then again, a questioning, and asking yourself and doubting about how things are done. And my time might not be enough to go into each of you, but I am just giving these examples, to maybe make a point — that one can almost do a little phenomenology of the processing. And Vidha, you talked about the gaps and in your writing I also see — and also now in comparison or in relation to Emma’s or Andrea’s texts — that There are moments I guess where you kind of try to grasp and condense and you don’t write. You are there and you think whatever you do, and there is a scarcity of words. And then the humorous aspect happens when almost impossible comparisons happen between the words and the way that you also position them on the paper. Yes, so much swirling around — I think that one of the things here, is coming back to this almost false certainty at the start which I had, which was that one of the things that we agreed about was, or what was agreed upon, was the where of the writing, that the where would be the location of the market square in Vaasa, and we could delimit that by the place of the cobble stones. So this would be where we would write from, and then as you were talking, and as I think about my own writing, I realise that the where of the writing is quite a different place altogether. That somehow there are these shifts of attention or calls between the site itself, the materiality of the market square, the kind of external reality in some ways of the market square, but also the materiality or the call of the words on the page themselves, and then this sense of this flow of thought. And then this writing emerging through a kind of interplay of attending or shifting of attention between these different calls — between the call of thought and the call of the words and the call of the space. And, yes, maybe thinking also about this other reference to van Manen, and to the textorium, and this idea of the virtual space that writing opens up. And how in this act of writing together we were navigating the space of the square, at the same time navigating this virtual space which was opening up for each of us within our own writing. And this experience of being in and out, you were talking about this Andrea, this sense of being in and out of a sense of self or subjectivity, at times disappearing, at times coming more into appearance, at times becoming the writing. And then at times, feeling quite alienated or outside of the writing.
And this ‘in and out’ I could also experience in terms of time. I think that in my own text, At times, the time is marked and remarked upon. At other times, the temporality of the writing almost felt atemporal, like a suspended time. And when we were reading together, this play between chronological time, a sense of time actually unfolding, second by second, or minute by minute, and then this sort of atemporal time that opens up — a pocket or a gap — felt very tangible. That this time of writing feels as if it has no time, sometimes.
And then there was something about these different, the different spaces that writing opens up. I was thinking about what it is to witness someone writing —what it would be like to witness us writing, what is was like to witness us writing. And the opacity in that — to witness someone writing but not to witness what is being written. Yes, and that we were in a way engaged in something that remained unseen for observers, this sense of opaqueness. This sense of how the act of writing, even more than what is written, creates a gap or an opening or this ambiguity, this uncertainty in the space … so much so, that I was even thinking what would it have been like if we had never shared the writing? If we had only engaged in writing together without ever sharing the writing, I got curious about that. Then there is this other space that the text opens up, that again, is not quite the same as the square itself. So there is something about the way in which writing establishes these other spaces in relation to an existing space, a nameable place like the square. Whether this is an opaque presence, or the space of the textorium. I am really intrigued by what you just said, Emma, about the agreement that or that if we would have been writing with the thought that we would not share the texts at all. And how different that would be. So many that was one of the unspoken agreements, that will write, but we will also share the writing. And I kind of, when I think about the experience of writing together, knowing that we will also share the writing, maybe that was the thing that was really energising and supporting and allowing, when actually doing the writing. Because for me, Writing in the public site is actually quite a hard thing to do, you know, it is difficult to concentrate, to avoid fiction, and to really, really stay with the corporeal writing. But I think that was like a very deep line for me about what the collective is, by knowing that we will share the writing. And maybe there is also something that could be linked to sharing such activities, because as we write, based on our bodily observations of the market square, when we then have the possibility to engage with each other’s writing, it is somehow based on a very subjective, corporeal experience. So that is like super different from all the other sharings that are going on, on the market square, and that is quite important to me I think.
Then I think that there is also something about the writing and the gaps between observation and fiction.
which also, one of my, What I think or hope that can happen through this kind of collective writing is also a certain allowance of being a transformational self. So each time I do the writing I also allow myself to experience in different ways, and that openness is maybe like a cue for the actual writing. And there is something about doing the things that we agree upon, without actually having a common goal. I think that this is also something that feels that it is lovely to achieve that, that there is this sense of doing something and being relaxed, even though I do not know at all where I am going with the things that I am doing. I think that this is also super enjoyable and I think it can happen a lot when there is a score, like the score What is Agreed Upon was to me, when you go into this flow and you are doing things that are in a way new to you, but at the same time you have this feeling that you really know what you are doing — even though it is surprising to yourself. And that is such a huge pleasure also. And, I am also thinking a bit about us on the cobble stones. And I just wanted to say __kullersten_______ cobble stone, ___mukulakivi____, _______, _______, cobble stone. Just to feel how the different languages bring out different qualities of that stone that you described Andrea. And, one thing I like really a lot about when we write, or What I am interested in about writing in the market square, is the relationship between the artist and the motif, because that is kind of undermined by this writing because the motif being in this open roofless space is everywhere. There is no way that you can outline or define or master what you are writing about. So in a way, you know, I can say that there is, earlier I used the word puppet-master but in a way the action is further away from any strings being attached. It is more like finding a kind of balance. I am also thinking about the activity that we are doing now, and thinking about it in reference to these, not just the texts that we read out from what was written, but also now the surround of an observation on that, on that what was written but also on what we are doing now and this kind of reflection. And it creates this kind of a visual for me of being surrounded by various kinds of mirrors. So that it just, it is like the activity is still singular, of us being in the market square and just writing, but then it has, because of the multiple reflections, it is getting multiplied for want of a better word. But it is also offering a view that would not be possible if one was just in front of one mirror, so it is not a singular reflection but a multitude of reflections and offering almost like a Cubist view of an activity. So that I find as a visual really interesting, and something that I would feel, yes, I would feel compelled to kind of follow that visual process through, like looking at the visuality of this activity that we are doing. And yes, also it is just so interesting to listen to everybody, mainly because it like a really stretches one’s sense of memory of the place. Because I have — as Cordula rightfully observed — there is these big pauses and skipping over of certain observations because of what I described earlier. It is like this constant dialogue between two states of mind, and I am still trying to get my word in. So what I have written down is just me trying to intervene with something that I want, in a more tangible format, to sit there as my activity. So yes, these kind of visuals are very interesting for me, and I have also found that when I, especially when I am listening to everyone, or when I am observing, There is this constant interplay of visual and text which is very important for me, to be able to properly grasp something. It can be information, it could be a certain visuality, but I feel the need to do these two things simultaneously, to create images and put something in a text. Like neither just work independently for me, so they are always in this clubbed manner. But when I was doing the activity of writing, or when we were writing together, it was mainly writing, and now in retrospect, I feel maybe I should have made some drawings or some kind of these kind of diagrams of observation, which may not be, yes, which may not be something that can be deciphered by everybody in a way, but maybe we can understand lines and circles and directions, all these signages and these kinds of diagrams resonate with a visual culture that we are familiar with. And like text, drawing also I feel is this kind of note-making. And maybe in the process, as we move forward with this, I would like to think about how to utilise this manner of note making. Yet, this is not to say that text is not as interesting for me, I am just thinking from my own perspective, it does not, it does not give me a full hold of something, I need to, I feel the need to simultaneously make a note in another manner, which is that of drawings. And, yes I am also thinking about the drawing, I think, from the perspective of movement as well, how we are moving in these spaces. And, is there a way to make note of that. I think Emma mentioned in this last round, or was it in the text I am getting mixed up, about observing oneself observing something. And observing also each other, and I was thinking if there was somebody else just mapping our movement, or making a directional, just with arrows or lines. How we have placed ourselves in different locations each time we have written. So that could be something I would like to explore in this process, yes. And I think In what was being spoken right now, I really like the word ‘porous’. And, it comes from this small video I was watching about how to check the porosity of hair. And it had these three stages of whether the hair floats on the glass or whether it stays in the middle or sinks to the bottom. And I was thinking about then the porosity of us as writers or as observers in this space, and how much of depth are we willing to go to or how surficial we remain.
BELOW RIGHT: We present further annotations and comments through which we attempt to continue the dialogue, keep the emerging ideas in circulation. An attempt is made here to 'show' or share an emergent practice of collaborative writing, through its resulting artefacts and documents, rather than necessarily present a text comprising resolved insights, arguments or conclusions.
Writing in the proximity of others (in the same space, at the same time, in response to the same ‘score’) has a dual effect: prompting me to attend more closely to the matter of 'how do I write?', whilst simultaneously inviting me to wonder, 'how do you write?' Accordingly, it draws to the surface some of the latent decisions and habits present within my own writing, whilst inviting me to also consider 'how else?’'.
Circulation — from circulacioun, in alchemy, a 'process of changing'. To write within collaborative context is to enter into circulation with other writers, to open one’s own practice to the influence of other practices.
Influence — from in (into, in) and fluere (to flow). To flow into. To circulate — to pass about freely, pass from place to place or person to person. A willingness to share one’s practices and for them to be changed, moreover, to be changed by the practices of another.
The commitment is the agreement. The doing at the same in the same place. In context with to overwhelming on-and off-line realities we live in which ask for a lot of multitasking and decision taking, there seems to be a soothing aspect to this. A ritualistic aspect. The specific pleasure of live and collective writing comes with might be related to the score as a form of being held by and through others in a simultaneous doing. Giving oneself over to focusing on just 'that', in 'this moment'.
A constraint that leads to a style. A constraint that informs an aesthetic choice.
We are reminded also of the use of constraints within the OuLiPo - an acronym for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop for Potential Literature), a group of writers and mathematicians formed in France in 1960 by poet Raymond Queneau and mathematician François Le Lionnais (and of which Georges Perec was a member).
And do associations play their game with us? I mean you observe something and are instantly thrown into a chain of thoughts.
This resonates with me. When the score very open the mind starts to create sub-scores, reasons and instructions, self-commissions in order to fabricate a sense. Besides the resistance that is being felt towards the outside. There is also a resistance from the inside, a voice that ridicules everything and renders the doing impossible.
Yves Citton describes the potential of ‘joint attention’, collective attention and even individuating attention as the “co-presence of attentive bodies sharing the same space over the course of infinitesimal but decisive cognitive and emotional harmonizations”, in The Ecology of Attention, (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), p. 7.
Could it be that collective writing creates an augmented experience of liveness? If so, how would this be related to physical or corporal memory? Are you saying that the time pocket, or the 'taking the market square into your writerly pocket', affect other spatial experiences still to come?
Where are you when you listen — especially if you don’t grasp the language? Is it possible to be transformed by listening, even if you do not understand the language? What is at stake in this multi-lingual approach?
Collective writing as a multilingual group offers the potential to become aware of one’s cultural disposition and tendencies; how one’s senses and sensitivities have been culturally conditioned.
"To restore our perception of life, to make things tangible, to make the stone stony, there is what we call art. The goal of art is to give us a sense of the thing that is seeing and not just recognizing. In doing so, art uses two tricks: the alienation of things and the complication of form in order to make perception more difficult and prolong its duration. For in art the process of perception is an end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a means of experiencing the becoming of a thing; what has already become is unimportant for art." Viktor Shklovsky, 'Art as Technique' in Theory of Prose, (Moscou, 1925).
Towards a tactile mode of writing, a writing that is in touch with. This listening, haptic attitude towards writing enlarges the attentional and perceptual field of the writer. Whilst writing that privileges the visual and visible can at times appear with an almost lens-like photographic focus or directionality, an expanded multi-sensorial approach has the capacity to be simultaneously multi-directional
To write with the body pays attention to how one’s limits of perception are enabled and inhibited by the body and its proprioceptive capacities.
Here we understand our approach as one of performative writing rather than a performance of writing. We take inspiration from Della Pollock’s reflections on Performing Writing. [See ‘Performing Writing’, in Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane, eds., The Ends of Performance (New York University Press, 1998), pp. 73 - 103].
The types of re-readings — reading out loud in the space, to each other, reading the text on the paper etc.
“When we speak, we tend to stop listening to the object about which we speak. And now this object has lost its addressive and enigmatic power. Something can only speak to us if it is listened to, if we can be addressed by it.", Max van Manen, Phenomenology of Practice: Meaning-Giving Methods in Phenomenological Research and Writing, (Routledge, 2014), p. 240.
Beyond the visual, how can we write with/in public space as a form of training for the ears, as a practice for enhanced listening?
Listening increasingly emerges as the third field of practice alongside writing and reading.
Our interest is in public spaces inhabited by the ‘circulating practices’ of everyday activities: from people passing by on their way to somewhere else or meeting up with others for conversation. Whilst in principle our scores could be activated anywhere, we foreground the ‘square’ as a specific manifestation of open public space where people gather for various activities.
This happens to me too, and I guess we have had a score which was focusing on when you lose concentration. What do you do then? How do you get back to that state? Personally I feel, at that moment, of hanging around, my mind is set on roaming, and I am trying to be patient and find the next point of entry.
I am reminded of the writing of Simone Weil, when she says, “In such a work all that I call ‘I’ has to be passive. Attention alone — that attention which is so full that the ‘I’ disappears is required of me. I have to deprive all that I call ‘I’ in the light of my attention and turn it on to that which cannot be conceived.” Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, (London and New York: Routledge, 2002/1947), p. 118. First published as La Pesanteur et la grâce by Librairie PLON, Paris, 1947.
We were able to attend to something as hard and simple as: Being at a place and attending to our perceptions, allowing to live and write through different states without the pressure of producing anything specific.
I guess this is evident in Perec's example as well. There is also a link to framing in how space becomes a place because by framing it.
Very beautiful. If don't know Perec's work enough but it seems the joke or humour that lies in his title contains a strange inversion of what and who can be/become exhausted. The writer attempts to (exhaustively) describe a space through writing and by attending to what can't be written he invents a new space.
Even whilst writing, we are constantly being pulled elsewhere — experienced as momentary lapses of concentration or the pull of distraction or the seduction of association, endlessly and relentlessly drawing our attention and the writing away from the ‘now’, from the present of what is unfolding, towards other temporalities of future and past.
Michelle Boulous Walker describes: “A slow engagement with the ‘strangeness’ or otherness of the world — an engagement that transforms and moves us beyond ourselves.” Slow Philosophy: Reading Against the Institution, (London, New York: Bloomsbury 2017), p. 4.
I am reminded of Jane Rendell’s rethinking the use of prepositions for describing the act of writing (indeed of criticism), requiring a shift from “speaking ‘about’ to speaking ‘to’ ”, followed in turn, by a further transition of preposition from “to” into “with”. In fact, Rendell dispenses of the preposition altogether, stating “my own impulse was to ‘write’ rather than ‘write about’ architecture”, in Site-Writing: The Architecture of Art Criticism, (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2010), p. 7.
For me this is bigger — the impossible inventory — than the conflicting thoughts on choosing a place. The issue of the impossible task is already reflected on in the inspirational work by Georges Perec having the title "An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris" (2010). Committing to an attempt that cannot be fully accomplished, what does it influence or even change? Yesterday I was reading Nils Olsson, who is referring to Michail Bachtin and the essay "Epos och Roman" characterising the novel as an unfinished genre ("Konsten att sätta texter i verket. Gertrude Stein, Arne Sand och litteraturens (o)befintliga specificitet", 2012, p. 29). Nilsson argues that transitory elements are constitutive for the novel. My point is, can we take that further, can we say that only the transitory can be forwarded?
It seems there are several issues at stake here. 1) The conceptual reference to Perec. Isn't this a kind of underlying un/outspoken score? 2) An exhaustion of the self? 3) Committing to an attempt that cannot be fully accomplished, what does it influence or even change? What is the difference between the gesture of one person taking up this task (Perec) or a group? The one person writing in space could be almost overlooked by others. (Perec could operate incognito). A group of writers will be seen and noticed by others. This is where the re-flection happens, the circular moment of doing something, while being seen and noticed in the doing. 4) In what way are our scores relate to a genre? There has been an unoutspoken agreement that we would not turn or escape into fiction. Where and why does the fictional still seep in?
The term inventory already conceals the dual dimension of our enquiry: (1) To detail or to list, to name what is found; (2) Or else, from invenire — to find, to discover, or perhaps even to invent. From in- and venire ‘to come’. This relation between observation-documentation of what-is and invention, or rather, in and through writing bringing about the ‘to come’, the what-if, the what-might-be. Can writing bring into existence shared spaces and times constructed in/by/with text? Is this necessarily to ‘fiction’? We consider the notion of the textorium (the virtual space that writing opens up — detailed late) less — or at least not only - in terms of fictioning, but rather more as a phenomenal dimension of writerly experience.
The score 'what is agreed up' relates, more than all other scores, to a meta-reflection on reality as a socio-cultural construct. Here, the group of writers (a mini society) renders that question palpable with regard to a concrete physical space and a moment in time. What are the least common denominators of this reality? Only later in the playing back, we discover that certain elements, like an LCD screen, have 'written', 'noted' by more than one writer.
What 'stands out'?
“But there is not 'conclusion' to be found in writing,” in Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, (New York, 1993), p. 156.
Presence — the fact of being present, state of being in a certain place and not some other. Being present. Specifically, by foregrounding the bodily, corporeal, sensorial dimension of writing in public spaces, this project foregrounds both a sense of both presence (being there together at the same time, in the same place) and the present (the present tense of writing, the live moment of engaging in/with site, the immediate, instant, temporal unfolding of ‘now’).
For Irit Rogoff, “On the fact that in a reflective shift from the analytical to the performative function of observation and of participation we can agree that meaning is not excavated for but that it ‘Takes Place’ in the present”, Irit Rogoff, ‘WE: Collectivities, Mutualities, Participations’, in I Promise its Political, (Museum Ludwig: Cologne, 2002).
Details that stand out on the square. Details that stand out in a language. Words that stand out in a language one does not understand are often words that also belong to other languages. International linguistic common places.
Perec's title already carries this wink, this wit: "An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris". The writers moving along the square here can be compared to a search party scanning the forest floor looking for the scene of crime.
I guess I would go for the words are always late, that they cannot follow time as we have agreed upon but create their wonderful attachment to whatever there is.
Maybe here we are agreeing on having unspoken agreements, too? I like openness as a potential and would like to try it as a score, too.
A sense of non-purposed purposefulness (?) Is it that what a (good) score allows for?
Does the notion of having no purpose also help eschew the notion of utility?
I'm wondering what we mean when we speak about fiction here. Would it be more helpful to say that Perec tried to avoid "storytelling"? I'm saying this as the conventional distinction between observing (reality) and fictioning (making something up) as a practice seems not applicable if we operate in language. By radically attending to the everyday, Perec also 'makes up' a place, constructs a place in-and-through writing.
Alternatively, Wolfgang Iser describes the fictitious (or fictive) as “an operational mode of consciousness that makes inroads into existing versions of the world”, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, (1993 [1991], p. xiv).
I guess one could also think about transformation in the way Perec returned on three successive days, and was himself gradually transformed into one of the recurrent figures in the square. And his writing work, in turn, successively altered what he was observing; the square became a text and a written rendition of a public space. As collective writing and the week of Textorium in Vaasa differs from Perec's notations, the fact of being many rather than one writer, brings in thought on how the group of writers affect each other? Sometimes I have been thinking that the collective writing and the presence of the other writers is mimicking how we (people) interact in public spaces. The score — including Peripheral Vision (From the Corner of my Eye) and Acousmatic — has shown that we are very dependent on these when moving about public space. We don't need to register an approaching bike as we move to the side. But are our senses programmed to sense in a certain way, do we have sensorial preferences.
Phenomenologist Max van Manen refers to textorium as a “virtual space that the words open up […] The physical space of reading or writing allows me to pass through it into the world opened up by the words, the space of the text.” Max van Manen, Phenomenology of Practice, (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 358. Van Manen refers to writing/reading as a means of transference away from the everyday, perhaps differing from the quotidian that is brought into attention by writer Georges Perec, which is further enhanced by his concept of the infraordinary.
Is choosing a spot to write activating limits, drawing the areas to be perceived and notated? If the answer is yes, it can be met by arguing that writing on behalf of the bodily senses is activating sensual perception that is multidirectional.
If the answer is yes, it does not only activate the limits of perception of the space but also the body and its proprioception. A kneeling writer will write differently than a sitting writer.
Did I choose the place or the object, or did it choose me, call me, beckon my attention? Always these binaries — one or the other. Yet, at times, the relation between subject and object felt more mutual, more reciprocal — each producing the conditions for the other. An intimate relation — consider the word ‘intimation’, meaning ‘action of making known’. Is it the act of writing that ‘makes known’, or does the object of enquiry somehow make itself known, reveal itself, appear, in-and-through the act of writing?
All of our scores/prompts were time-bound, measured in minutes — e.g. 30 minutes, 20 minutes. The writing that they generated attests to a moment in time in the temporal unfolding of experience within the Market Square.
Yet the experience of time, of temporality, within the practice of writing itself felt much more elastic — at times, feeling longer than the designation of minutes; at times, much shorter — on occasion, feeling somehow atemporal, of the writing process somehow outside of time. Does this suggest that the textorium is not only a spatial concept — the space that writing opens up — but also has a temporal dimension, that is, textorium might refer also to the time and perception of temporality that writing opens up.
There seems to be a short circuit happening here between the time pocket into which you go (in the past) and the present you're in.
Writing with others creates solidarity — creates a common bond, a common goal. We each help create the conditions for the other’s attention, in turn, for their capacity to be transformed. We agree to remain, to stay with.
The stillness of our writing created unexpected disturbance of the regular circulatory rhythms and patterns of the Square. I have in mind the image of dropping a pebble into water, and the ripple effect expanding outwards from that one single gesture. I had not imagined that our stillness would be so visible, so disruptive, so resistant even.
Yet, now I reflect back on some of my previous publicly-sited participatory performance collaborations. Within my collaboration with the project, Open City, I had previously explored how the performance of stillness in the public realm might produce an affect that both reveals and disrupts habitual patterns of behaviour, whilst simultaneously creating a space into which to imagine — or even produce — the experience of something new or different. The act of stillness can be understood as a mode of playful resistance to — or refusal of — societal norms. Stillness presents a break or pause in the flow of habitual events, whilst illuminating temporal gaps and fissures within which alternative, even unexpected possibilities — for life — might emerge. Collective stillness thus has the capacity to exceed or move beyond resistance by producing germinal conditions for a nascent community of experience no longer bound by existing protocol but instead newly forming through the shared act of being still. [See Emma Cocker, 'Performing stillness: Community in Waiting', in Stillness in a Mobile World, eds. David Bissell, Gillian Fuller (Routledge, 2010).]
Perec observes how “there is something a little surprising about the idea of several people reading the same thing at the same time”, in ‘Reading: A Sociological Outline, in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, (Penguin, 1997), p. 180.
How then for several writers to be writing in the same space, at the same time, in relation to the same prompt? How might this unusual and unexpected synchronicity in action and attention impact differently?
For Irit Rogoff, “Furthermore that performative collectivity, one that is produced in the very act of being together in the same space and compelled by similar edicts, might just alert us to a form of mutuality which cannot be recognised in the normative modes of shared beliefs, interests or kinship […] to speak of mutualities is to think against the grain of ideological mobilisations that are grounded in the pursuit of an end, of a conclusion, of a resolution”, in Rogoff, WE: Collectivities, Mutualities, Participations (2002).
I would like to repeat this sentence. "So it was like the writing contained the reflection of the experience itself." Could this be a fold, doubling in and on the act of writing?
It is that writing contained the reflection but also about writing is the reflection. Meaning that there is no pre-reflection before writing but that there was the reflection happening with the writing.
Thinking in writing. Reflecting in writing.
Here, ‘we’ is an emergent phenomenon, created in and through an act of agreement, a commitment to practise together. Rather than a ‘we’ of consensus formed through habit, culture or conditioning, we are interested in the emergent ‘we’ that comes to life in-and-through the circulatory dynamic of shared (artistic research) practices.
How do we define and situate research collaborations? How to conceive this ‘we’, this community of artist-writers bound together in the shared act of writing together in the Square. Nina Möntmann asks: “What defines a community — certain qualities, common interests, a shared location? What do we expect from being part of a community? Which communities are freely chosen, which are imposed? Who’s in and who’s out? […] What are the differences between a community and a collective? What does being part of a collective add to or subtract from the subjectivity of the individual?”, Nina Möntmann, ‘New Communities’, in Public: Art Culture Ideas, 2009, p. 11.
Can we differentiate between fiction, fictive, fictionalising? What are our frames of reference? Which is it that we are endeavouring to suspend or keep at bay.
I am reminded of Nicolas Bourriaud’s writing on Altermodern, which he describes as ‘docufictional’ — in that it “explores the past and the present to create original paths where boundaries between fiction and documentary are blurred”.
See also Henriette Gunkel, Ayesha Hameed, Simon O'Sullivan (eds.), Futures and Fictions, (Repeater Books, 2017), and David Burrows, Simon O'Sullivan, Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy, (Edinburgh University Press, 2019).
In a sense, the market square felt to me less the object of our enquiry as such, the subject or focus of our writing, but rather it provided the spatial frame or contour within which a process of collaborative writing might unfold. Shift of preposition — writing with and from the site, rather than about or on it.
How open must a score be to be writing-enabling? Here the borders between score, invitation, pre-scription become blurry.