WITHING is an emergent framework for experimenting together, for sharing embodied practising, for testing possibilities for a bodily becoming of language/words,
WITHING is a thematic node of the Language Based Artistic Research Special Interest Group of the Society for Artistic Research,
WITHING is an ongoing, durational and collaborative project situated in the field of language-based artistic research,
WITHING is a community of multiple resonances
Conducted by an international group of six women artists, writers, performers & researchers, Delphine Chapuis Schmitz & Emma Cocker & Laressa Dickey & Sabina Holzer & Ines Marita Schärer & Litó Walkey,
WITHING is dedicated to collectively exploring the intra-action between bodying and languaging: How does bodying affect languaging? How does languaging affect bodying? How does movement inform wording? How does wording inform moving? How can we explore ways for languaging/bodying with, through and from sensing and somatic practices? How to find wording and worlding for the polyphonies of somatic experiences?
We first connected in October 2023 during Convocation II, a four-day gathering of language-based artistic research in Vienna. Since then, we have been creating shared conditions and situations for the mutual exploration of body/languaging through an iterative process of research, alternating individual and collective constellations, online and offline situations, and intertwining experimentation and reflection. Based on a series of scores and their enactments, we have developed a practice centered on embodied writing as a situated process of sense-making.
scores - notations - situations – conditions
Our exploratory work unfolds in different phases. Two first cycles have occurred in January-June 2024 and January-June 2025, both following a bi-monthly rhythm. In each iteration (see links on the left side), a pairing (two of us working together) devised a score, and shared it with the others in an online meeting. Each of us then tested, enacted, and activated the proposal offline for one month. We subsequently reconvened online to share materials, findings, discoveries, and reflections from our individual processes of responding to the common score.
The second phase revisited the scores of the first. Each pair created new scores (a) for individually reenacting their earlier score offline, and (b) for a collective embodied reflection during a subsequent online meeting.
Being in doing.
Being in practice together.
Body/Language.
Between the two, activating the between.
Moving
between different modalities,
shifting from one to the other.
Tilting towards.
Along-siding.
After two years of working from a distance, we again met in person in Vienna, in the frame of an Artist in Residency supported by ImPulsTanz in August 2025. During three days, we revisited the materials generated during the two first phases: we activated and expanded it in a series of open practice sessions, followed by rounds dedicated to disclosing the process and collectively reflecting our explorations.
Between October 2025 and March 2026, we will extend our shared practice with The WITHING Sessions, a series of radio broadcast on radio WORM.