The present exhibition presents the practice sharing session "Sensing Making Senses" which took place on Thursday Oct. 5. at Zentrum Fokus Forschung, Akademie der Künste, Vienna.
The session was part of Convocation II a meeting of Language Based Artistic Research (Special Interest Group). Over an hour and a half, it brought together eighteen participants from the field of language-based artistic research, and was conducted by us, Delphine Chapuis Schmitz and Ines Marita Schaerer.
The following paragraphs retrace the different steps of the session. A summarizing score is to be found on the far right of the page.
Waiting for the participants to arrive, Ines and
I positioned ourselves with our backs to the
bay window so that they could enjoy the view while we were talking. We could feel the trees extending their branches across our backs.
On the evening before, we had emptied the room of its rows of chairs and tables. Now flooded with morning light, it appeared more spacious still.
Once everybody had arrived and found a seat on the wooden floor, we started with a few words of introduction:
We share a core interest in writing and lan-guaging as embodied, embedded, and situated practices. While Ines's approach is marked by her involvement in somatic practices, Delphine has developed a transversal approach in contexts of transdisciplinarity in the arts.
Over the years, we have worked together in various contexts and constellations, as artists, curators, and editors. More recently, we have joined to develop a research project focusing on practices of sense-making as a process anchored in sensing.
This session represents for us a welcome opportunity to share the practice and to practice the sharing.
How to activate relations of sense through sensing in a shareable and challengeable way?
How does sharing affect our practice of making sense by means of language?
How to embed shareability and challengeability in the very practice of making sense from sensing?
These are the questions we are interested in engaging with in this session. Before we introduce its concrete unfolding, we would like to present two lines of thought which form its conceptual horizon. They arise from the French words "sens" and "écart".
Depending on its use, “sens” stands for
(i) modes of sensory perception, (ii) significa-tion and meaning, (iii) direction. The family resemblance between the first two uses interlaces the aesthetic and semantic dimensions, while the third points to the ability of the senses to show direction and produce differentiations in material entanglements.
From this perspective, sensing has the potential to expand established senses and to activate fluid relations of sense beyond traditional semantic boundaries.
In a similar vein, "écart" designates an inbetweenness, a transitional space from which similarities and differences emerge with no prior given poles.
In order to investigate such "écarts" in the field of sensing and to explore how they affect and effect languaging, we have designed an iterative process which starts with a sensing sequence, merges into a writing sequence, and ends with a final sequence of performative sharing. The following paragraphs introduce these sequences in detail.
1. At the beginning of the sensing sequence, participants are invited to take a yoga mat and to find a place and a position where they can be present with all their senses. Once every body is installed, the score "landing in the senses" is read aloud. The sensing sequence lasts ten minutes during which the participants are invited to be fully present to the multifarious relations activated.
The transition to writing is introduced in advance so that going from one state to the other occurs in a flow. It is signaled by a recording of waves by the sea: upon hearing it, the participants take their notebooks and enter writing.
2. The process activated by the sensing sequence is thereby continued on the page. We recommend an approach of situative writing where the writing unfolds in full awareness of the relationalities present in the situation, and occurs in response to them. The linguistic material is thereby effected and affected by the specific relations which constitute the present entanglement. The writing shall not record, interpret, not translate the sensing, rather, it unfolds in response to it.
The writing sequence lasts ten minutes and its end is signaled by the sound of waves.
3. The next sequence occurs in groups of three
to four and consists in the following steps.
3.1. First the participants are invited to share their texts with the group, by navigating it, selecting the passages they wish to share, and reading them aloud. The selection shall occur spontaneously and be led by the words encountered rather than rational decision.
3.2. Once every body has read from their texts,
they go back to their notebooks. This time the words which keep resonating from the previous sharing are written down.
3.3.. The resonating texts written in 3.2. are shared with the group and woven in a collective composition. Each group devises their own method to do the composing, based on the texts they have gathered and on the specifics of their interactions.
4. In a final sequence, the groups come together and share their compositions. The collective texts are voiced and/or performed in a flow from group to group. The sharing sequence thus merges into a collective performance.
During the session in Vienna, the groups adopted the following approaches for composing their texts in step 3.3.:
– the resonating texts were written down as a series of lines on A4 pages, then cut up and rearranged in a new text,
– the practice of cadavre exquis was adopted,
– a choreographic reading including gestures and bodily movements was developed,
– the texts written in 3.2. were read aloud by the group in an improvised voicing performance,
– single words in a language unknown to the others were shared in a conversational exchange.
SHORT SCRIPT OF THE PRACTICE
1. a sensing sequence (whole group, ca. 10')
merges into
2. a writing sequence (individual, ca.10')
Then, in groups of three to four:
3.1. passages from the texts written in 2 are shared with the group (ca. 10')
3.2. each writes down the words resonating with them (ca. 5')
3.3. the resonating words are shared with the group and woven in a collective composition (ca. 20')
4. The groups come together and share their compositions in a final performative sequence.
We intended the session as a first experiment of sharing with a large number of participants. We would like to thank everybody present in Vienna for their engagement. The pictures, texts, and audio file below give a glimpse of the density of the collective experience and of the richness of the material produced.
We now intend to pursue this field of research in further formats and settings.
If you have questions, comments, or if you would like to share similar practices, do not hesitate to contact us.
Thank you to all participants:
Antrianna Moutoula, Benjamin Jenner,
Beverley Carruthers, Charlotta Ruth, Cristiana de Marchi, Cordula Daus, Delphine Grass,
Elke Mark, Emílio Remelhe, Emma Cocker, Erika Tsimbrovsky, Hannah van Hove, Kai Ziegner, Lena Séraphin, Litó Walkey, Maria Gil Ulldemolins, Mariana Renthel, Regina Dürig, Sara Gomez, Wiebke Leister.
The authors
Delphine Chapuis Schmitz (F/CH) works as an artist-researcher, as an artist-writer, as a writer-teacher, as a teacher-translator. Her field of research revolves around embedded and embodied practices of sense-making, the po(ï)ethical potentials of language-s, and the exploration of meaningful relationalities in sensory entanglements. The development of a relational and performative practice of writing is at the core of her situated practice, which involves collaborative constellations of various kinds and making-thinking from a transversal perspective.
Ines Marita Schärer (CH) works across poetry, performance, installation, sound art and experimental music. She is concerned with the precarities and vulnerabilities of diverse human and more-than-human beings within predominant power structures and explores voice and words as a means of establishing relationality and re-imagining their conditions and environments. Her practice is informed by the given context, permeable for various forms of knowledge, nourished and driven by thinkers, co-thinkers, collaborators and allies.
contact: delphine.chapuis-schmitz(at)zhdk.ch