TEXTORIUM: Collaborative Writing-Reading with/in Public Space

Emma Cocker

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.

Emma Cocker is a UK based writer-artist, and Associate Professor in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University. Her practice unfolds restlessly along the threshold between writing/art, including experimental, performative and collaborative approaches to language-based artistic research. She is co-founder of the Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research.

Andrea Coyotzi Borja is a Helsinki based artist. Her artistic practice focuses on the subject of everyday life, daily occurrences, encounters, gestures, and how these resonate within personal histories. This developed into her current research on the infraordinary as part of her Doctoral studies at Aalto University. Her artwork has been exhibited in different countries such as México, United States, Italy, Hungary, Poland, Spain, Bulgaria, and Finland.

Cordula Daus is a writer and artist who works across disciplines combining field research, literary fiction and performance. She currently holds a fellowship with her artistic research Outer Woman (Austrian Science Fund/FWF) at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. She is co-founder of the Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research.

Vidha Saumya is a Helsinki based artist-poet, and the co-founder and co-editor of the online art magazine NO NIIN. She has studied art and art theory in Mumbai, Bengaluru, Lahore, and Helsinki and has exhibited across India and North Europe.

Lena Séraphin is a Helsinki based artist. Her practice is based on sensitive text/writing, and her postdoctoral research project at the Åbo Akademi University in Finland 2020-2023, Sharing Text, explored how text can be published site purposely and written collectively in public space. She is co-founder of the Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research.

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