Zentrum Fokus Forschung
University of Applied Arts Vienna
Rustenschacherallee 2-4, 1020 Wien, Austria
Taking place in Vienna (3 – 6 October 2023), Convocation II is a gathering of expanded language-based artistic research, focused on the sharing of “practices.” Convocation — from com ‘with, together’ and vocare ‘to call’. We call for a live “coming together” of artistic researchers whose practices engage with the materiality and mediality of language: 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. Convocation II is conceived as a reciprocal space for creating interconnections with a wider international community of artistic researchers working with language. The focus on language within artistic research is considered from a broad and transforming perspective to include diverse fields such as visual arts, performance, film, theatre, music, choreography as well as literature. The intent is not to define or fix what language-based artistic research is but rather to reflect how it is practised in its diversity.
The focus of Convocation II is on language-based artistic research “practices”.
We ask: How can we share research “practices”? What new formats and models might be required? What happens as different practices are brought into relation, into dialogue, into proximity? How might we practise together?
Contributions to Convocation II take the form of:
Practice Sharings or Glimpses
Practice Sharing (Duration: 10 – 90 minutes)
The Practice Sharing format focuses on an experiential encounter with the live unfolding of a practice — this mode of engagement could be participatory, performative, exploratory, speculative. How can you share your “practice”? How might others engage with/in/through your specific “practice” — what ways of dwelling in or inhabiting; activating or enacting; doing or not-doing a practice together might be opened or shared? We invite diverse forms of sharing – which could include “doing things together”, walks, collective activities or exercises, performances, actions, workshop formats (and other possibilities ……)
Glimpses (Duration: 10 mins)
The Glimpses format is conceived as short presentations to give a ‘flavour’ or offer a glimpse into a practice.
Location
The Zentrum Fokus Forschung is a unit at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, in which independent artistic research is generated and connected. The building itself comprises various indoor research spaces, surrounded by a walled garden. It is located on the edge of the Prater, a large public park in Leopoldstadt, Vienna. Proposals were invited that take advantage of this distinctive location — whether inside the building or outside in the gardens, as well as further afield within the Prater or neighbouring district.
Convocation II is hosted by the Society of Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research (co-founded by Emma Cocker, Alexander Damianisch, Cordula Daus and Lena Séraphin). It builds upon and extends conversations from Convocation I which took place within the frame of the Research Pavilion, Venice, 2019. Convocation II will create a live and in-person context for further ‘sharing practices’ of language-based artistic research, following publication of two online Practice Sharing presentations in 2020 and 2023.
CONVOCATION II is not a public event, rather it is conceived as an intimate gathering of language-based artistic research involving the sharing of practice between around 65 individuals. Rather than a public conference or symposium as such, CONVOCATION II has been planned with a more personal format, allowing for exchange and conversation between contributors, especially through a process of ‘practice sharing’.
PARALLEL SESSIONS
15.30 - 17.00
________________________________________________________________
Kai Ziegner | How to Voice the Unspeakable
LOCATION: INDOORS I // DURATION: 90 MINUTES
A Lecture Performance: Kai Ziegner's project "Franz, the War and the Oranges of Fort Ord" follows in the footsteps of his grandparents Franz and Marianne. Coming from a small Saxon village, they were initially staunch Nazis. Franz travelled the world as a soldier and became a prisoner of war in California. Marianne looked after the family farm and the forced labourers who worked there. Ziegner will show artifacts, that he has collected and a selection of photographs he has taken and he will read his own speculative texts together with the participants.
________________________________________________________________
Benjamin Jenner| WALKING BETWEEN WOR[L]DS WITH LINES
LOCATION: GARDEN // DURATION: 90 MINUTES
In this practice sharing Benjamin Jenner explores how, in the absence of vision, the body, language and landscape combine to form a particular type of cartographic, text-informed, mental image in the mind, that is both a record of movement and a score for future object intra-actions. For Convocation, Jenner will assist participants in navigating blindfold through the landscape of Zentrum Fokus Forschung (ZFF). The blurring of physical site and temporal event is deliberate here, the activity of navigating blindfolded with the body generatively blending with psychic travel in the mind. This is an opportunity for participants to think about how vision enables a particular version of the wor[l]d, and to speculate on what other kinds of wor[l]d might be possible in vision’s absence.
OPENING GATHERING
14.00 - 15.15
LOCATION: INDOORS I
________________________________________________________________
Emma Cocker, Cordula Daus, Lena Séraphin | Convocation
DURATION: 30 MINUTES
A welcome and introduction from Emma Cocker, Cordula Daus, Lena Séraphin (co-organisers of Convocation) and Alexander Damianisch, Head of Zentrum Fokus Forschung [the four co-founders of the Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research].
________________________________________________________________
Elena Peytchinska & Thomas Ballhausen | From New Ecology of the Book to Operative Fiction. An Exercise in Spatial Writing
DURATION: 30 MINUTES
In their exploration of the spatiality of language, Peytchinska & Ballhausen examine the multilayered experience of the book as an object as well as a geometrical, topological and especially performative space, which they understand as a turbulent ecology. Further elaborating this practice, the poetics of Operative Fiction is not only about the encounter with the supposedly unthinkable other but about its active and necessary integration into one’s process of thinking and creating. Peytchinska & Ballhausen understand their artistic research collaboration as a complex texture of literary, scientific, spatial, material and performative writing practices: an ecosystem of agencies and operations, theory and fiction.
________________________________________________________________
Lena Séraphin | Collective Writing in Public Space
LOCATION: MEET AT ZFF / DURATION: 90 MINUTES
The aim of this collective attempt at writing is to position ourselves in shared spaces and reciprocated texts, and to study how we respond to public space by notating what we observe not only with eyesight but with all bodily senses. This live-writing has a performative quality as the writers are being observed themselves. Since it is undoable to write down everything that happens in one’s surroundings, the writing becomes a series of choices. The workshop is about learning to be aware of these choices and questions if there is a possibility that the physical senses perceive in a categoric mode.
________________________________________________________________
Louise Adkins | Notes for a Performance – Revisioning a Smoky Meeting
DURATION: 10-MINS GLIMPSE
Louise Adkins will perform an extract from the performance script, Notes for a Performance – Revisioning a Smoky Meeting part of an ongoing research project titled Notes for a Performance. The performances and accompanying scripts have been informed by a series of artist residencies working with historical collections, heritage archives and sites across the UK. Working with audio description writing techniques the performances scripts present a disjunctive temporal reading of the historical sites and collections. The scripts articulate a cyclical narrative structure that assimilated past, present, and future tense incorporating repetitive voices that layer, loop, fold, and crack with every recitation. These performance scripts presented a synchronic voicing of historical documents that with each repetition evolved into a diachronic reading of the past.
________________________________________________________________
Gretel Acosta López/ Contemporary art to read. Literature in art context
DURATION: 10-MINUTE GLIMPSE
Gretel Acosta López’s research examines two growing scenarios: narrative fiction works conceived as art in contemporary art context and works virtually creating contemporary art in fiction. She explores visual artists using literary forms for artistic creation (e.g. Fabio Kacero, Pablo Helguera, and Yornel Martínez) as well as writers incorporating contemporary art as setting and theme in their works (e.g. Juan Cárdenas, Héctor Manjarrez, and Margarita Mateo Palmer). Her research attempts to foster a deeper understanding of the artistic potential of these literary texts, alongside considering the potential impact of bridging gaps between contemporary art and narrative fiction.
PARALLEL SESSIONS
17.15 - 18.45
________________________________________________________________
Ruth Anderwald & Leonhard Grond | Am Schüttel-A Mis/Guided Tour through the Neighbourhood
Location: Meet at ZFF // Duration: 90 minutes
The performative walk Am Schüttel by Ruth Anderwald & Leonhard Grond will highlight certain historical, artistic, architectural and urban contexts of the backdrop of the Zentrum Fokus Forschung, in which the gathering is located. The delving into the background of the neighbourhood will foreground topics and conversations that are both specific to its local situatedeness, as well as related to current practices of artistic and language-based research.
________________________________________________________________
Beverley Carruthers | Guttin’ Quines
DURATION: 10-MINUTE GLIMPSE
In this research project Beverley Carruthers investigates the story of the Guttin’ Quines, through oral histories of those with lived experience. Participants in the project have been invited to share and exchange stories of their lives: telling the story of the fisher girls from multiple perspectives of gutting fish, knitting and the songs they sang. Through these interviews it is clear that fishermen wore “ganseys” that identified them as being from a specific location. Carruthers uses these gansey knitting patterns as the basis for the score as she edited oral histories and field recordings to create contemporary versions of a Gaelic waulking song: * GP7 Great Yarmouth Old Charlie Grice’s Gansey; * GP24 Sheringham Belsha Johnson’s Gansey.
SOFT LANDING
Orientation / Exploration / Testing
11.00 - 13.30
________________________________________________________________
Self-organised: Prior to the official beginning of Convocation II, there is time available for contributors to arrive onsite and familiarise themselves with the location, specifically those contributors who are planning sessions in the garden. Groups or collaborations are also very welcome to meet onsite in advance of 14.00.
FOOD + DRINKS
18.45 - 19.30
________________________________________________________________
Sharing conversation + eating together : informal gathering at ZFF (Food + drink provided).
'Notes for a Performance - Revisioning a Smoky Meeting' - performance documentation. Jonathan Purcell (2018)
Kai Ziegner, “Franz, the War and the Oranges of Fort Ord”, medallion with black-and-white photographs, private collection & reproduction.
Fabio Kacero. Salisbury, 2014, Instalation, variable dimensions Museo Nacional de la Ciudad de Buenos Aire, MAMBA, 2014
________________________________________________________________
Anna Nygren | TRANS-LATE / MISS-SPELL-ING / AUTISTIC MAGICAL WOR(L)DING.
DURATION: 10-MINUTE GLIMPSE
The autistic word-thing means words can have magical or hidden meanings; working with the translations I find translate means Trans-Late: the lateness giving way to a queer time that opens the words to Other times. I changed my name: Anna N (well it’s the same, same is different!) became AnnaN – “annan” in swedish means “other”, the hidden thing inside me that I don’t know. The words are not human. The autistic has a problem with human, never being fully… being Other, yes yes.
MORNING GATHERING
09.00 - 10.30
LOCATION: INDOORS I
________________________________________________________________
Rob Flint | This Is Not a Picture (In Person)
DURATION: 2O MINUTES
Exploring the extralinguistic properties of collectively-spoken words as an instrument for inducing a temporary unity within a group. From a printed text score with distinct parts marked for immediate understanding, volunteers read out loud in unison, experiencing in oral and embodied ways the rhythmic ‘meaning’ of a series of sentences from published scientific papers describing in the first person plural experimental procedures for measuring human visual perception. Echoing religious, magical, legal and ceremonial practices, this action may be used to (ob)serve a quasi-ritual function within the overall event. Everyone attending will participate, briefly collapsing the boundary of audience and performer. (With thanks to Denis Schluppeck for plundered publications)
________________________________________________________________
Katrina Brown & Emma Cocker | Dorsal Practices
DURATION: 10-MINUTE GLIMPSE
Choreographer Katrina Brown and writer-artist Emma Cocker present a ‘glimpse’ of Dorsal Practices — an interdisciplinary collaboration for exploring the notion of dorsality (and a back-oriented awareness and attitude), in relation to how we as moving bodies orientate to self, others, world. A dorsal orientation invites an active letting go; releasing, or even de-privileging of the predominant social habits of uprightness and frontality — the head-oriented, sight-oriented, forward-facing, future-leaning tendencies of a culture intent on grasping a sense of the world through naming and control. We ask: What forms of languaging can be developed in fidelity to the embodied experiences of dorsality? What new approaches emerge in the intermingling of movement-based ways of feeling-thinking-knowing and language-based artistic research?
PARALLEL SESSIONS
14.00 - 15.30
________________________________________________________________
Linnea Langfjord Kristensen | The Fold
LOCATION: INDOORS I / DURATION: 90 MINUTES
The Fold is a practice for collaborative art making through a vocabulary centred around: Trust, Dependency, Poetics, Relations. It’s derived from research into how the specific ways in which we relate to our immediate surroundings through language, shape the knowledge and values we produce and consume. Therefore, affecting what we create.
The vocabulary are antonyms to the current dominating narrative that tells us to be independent, successful, strong and extraordinary individuals. If we change the language of how we fold our surroundings inside, will we be able to fold differently and by that, will our creative outcomes change?
________________________________________________________________
Sophie Hope & Henry Mulhall | Cards on the Table
LOCATION: INDOORS II + GARDEN / DURATION: 90 MINUTES
Cards on the Table is a tool that mediates difficult meetings and encourages people to speak and think differently about projects of shared concern. The game is also a practical intervention that encourages reflect on assumptions around language use and its implications. For Convocation II, the game will be turned on itself in 90-minute practice sharing workshop. Through speaking and listening, we will reflect on artistic research practices across different contexts. We will ask if the game can become a performative research output where language is created, captured, and distributed through the act of playing?
Henry and Sophie are co-leads of Cards on the Table (COTT), a game that helps people think and talk critically about a specific project that they are all working on as a group. It allows you to talk about doubts, fears, and hopes in an open way - and maybe become better collaborators as a result.
________________________________________________________________
* SCOPE FOR ADDITIONAL SESSION IN GARDEN
EVENING GATHERING
19.15- 21.00
LOCATION: INDOORS I
________________________________________________________________
Miriana Faieta | Re-voicing the text: Echo as an improviser
DURATION: 20 MINUTES
This practice aims to rethink the relationship between voice and text, reading and improvising. Where is the border between reading and singing? Can reading develop into a musical improvisation? And how does that affect the signifying properties of the words? Largely inspired by the figure of Echo, in Re-voicing the text we will try to layer multiple meanings over the “original” text on which we will improvise extrapolating syllables and words. Through this practice we will explore how the meaning of the words gets shaped acoustically and relationally, emerging in different ways with each vocal interpolation.
PARALLEL SESSIONS
11.00 - 12.30
________________________________________________________________
Adelheid Mers | Generating text with The Braid: A workshop
LOCATION: INDOORS 1 / DURATION: 90 MINUTES
The Braid is a diagrammatic facilitation instrument that emphasizes thinking in space, through an adjacency of embodied and propositional knowing. It was derived from conversations with experimental musicians and other artists about how they work and is often deployed to facilitate conversations about artistic and other practices. Outcomes may be new thinking about practice, and an impetus toward new work, as used for example with Steve Dutton, in the “Articulating Solitudes” pairing reported on during Affinities and Urgencies in Language-based Artistic Research, 2022. Recently, the facilitation process expanded to also yield entries into new writing. The proposed workshop is to further explore this capacity for collaboratively generating texts from within considerations of the topologies of practice.
________________________________________________________________
* SCOPE FOR ADDITIONAL SESSION IN GARDEN
_______________________________________________________________
Wiebke Leister | Echoes and Callings - A Hannya Manifesto
LOCATION: INDOORS I / DURATION: 60 MINUTES
Wiebke Leister’s recent publication ‘Echoes and Callings: A Hannya Manifesto’ (2018-) revolves around the interdisciplinary, non-representational nature of Japanese Noh theatre, looking to transcribe the transformations of angry women into fierce demons through means of photo-textual performance. In this 60-minute participatory session Leister proposes to workshop the script of the short ‘meta-Noh-play’ she wrote for the book into a spoken voice chorus to think about how the dialogue can be adapted for live performance.
The resulting 5-10 minute joint reading will be presented in the final ‘gathering’ of Convocation on Friday 6 October.
FOOD + DRINK
18.15 - 19.15
________________________________________________________________
Sharing conversation + eating together : informal gathering at ZFF (Food + drink provided).
Emma Cocker & Katrina Brown, Documentation of a conversation/listening practice within the project Dorsal Practices, 2022.
________________________________________________________________
Cordula Daus & Charlotta Ruth | We-speak
LOCATION: INDOOR II + GARDEN / DURATION: 60 MINUTES
‘We’ is a strange language thing. Depending on its use and context the plural first-person pronoun may include or exclude you and me, the readers; it may co-opt us into unwanted communities or turn us into majesties.
Inside the participatory performance Questionology - Program for Applied Questioning (Daus/Ruth 2021), we-speak was used as a central element for world-building. In their dialogical workshop Cordula Daus and Charlotta Ruth take up this thread to further explore the potentials and qualities of constrained we-speaking and writing with fellow language nerds. The participants are invited to one-on-one walks and error-friendly conversational improvisations: What happens when we leave the 'I' behind? How does language (English) perform through 'us'?
PARALLEL SESSIONS
16.00 - 17.00
________________________________________________________________
Tatjana Macić | Who Speaks? Who Sings
LOCATION: GARDEN/ DURATION: 45 MINS
In "Who Speaks? Who Sings?”- speculation Nr. 9 Tatjana Macić aims to share a performative and embodied language-based practice on the intersection of an artistic intervention, performance and micro opera. In which ways can we embody language(s) by making them transparent, visual and embodied experiences? With an intent to make visible that what is now hidden, small, shy and subjective, this research offers space for temporary and inclusive actions with the audience. Research methods include: whispering, singing, speaking, composing without notation systems, writing and performance.
PARALLEL SESSIONS
17.15 - 18.15
________________________________________________________________
Antrianna Moutoula | Nonstop languaging as autotheory in art and academia.
LOCATION: INDOORS I / DURATION: 60 MINUTES
A durational sharing of the autotheoretical performance practice of nonstop languaging. A woman talks and writes nonstop, tracing her thoughts through language, in real time, in front of the audience. She performs autotheory by merging methods of articulating autobiography (carrying the self in language) with methods of forming and digesting theory. An overload of words, thoughts, lyrics, memories, and citations, that seek their own linearity.
________________________________________________________________
Sara Gómez | Choreographic Utterance no. 1 - Notes for a Performative Lecture
DURATION: 30 MINUTES
This is a work on how choreography acquires a stable structure that becomes perceptible and possible to be read by assembling diverse elements that would previously have no relationship, creating new meanings: here, objects are joined to words, images to sounds by the body. Gómez will seek to show this structuring by building a choreographic utterance assembling heterogeneous elements, which remain open to the multiplicity of derived senses, and to the possibility of speculating new words for what it still has no name to be thought of. Choreography is an aesthetic apparatus that creates sensible apparitions to think about the world.
________________________________________________________________
* SCOPE FOR ADDITIONAL SESSION IN GARDEN
Intergalactic Pollinators, performance by Tatjana Macić in Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, photo by Illya Rabinovich
Detail from citations are bricks, performed during Springboard Art Fair, Utrecht, 2023. Antrianna Moutoula
Image: Choreographic utterance 01. Notes for a Performative Lecture, by Sara Gómez. Photographic documentation during the INprescindibles #49 Artistic Residency, by La Poderosa, Barcelona, Spain. May 2022.
PARALLEL SESSIONS
16.00 17.30
________________________________________________________________
(D)RAFT | (ODD)KINSHIP AS CREATIVE-CRITICAL PRACTICE
LOCATION: INDOORS I / DURATION: 90 MINUTES
For (D)raft, the concept of kinship also involves considering the multispecies dimensions of our writing: our kinning means thinking with the human and more-than-human, with the organic and the inorganic, with the living and dead. It involves, as Donna Haraway says, ‘making oddkin’: that means making ‘unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles’. In this workshop, (D)raft invite participants to explore (odd)kinship through Haraway’s notion of the ‘compost pile’. Enacting the tender, mushy connections between our practices, participants will become ‘compostists’, working collaboratively to forge a new grammar for our wor(l)ds and to explore notions of practice that are ‘always situated, someplace and not nonplace, entangled and worldly’.
References: Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 60.
________________________________________________________________
Aleksandra Komsta and Cecilie Fang | Material Reading
LOCATION: INDOORS II / DURATION: 45 MINUTES
Material reading is a performative practice-sharing. It is a moment where the processes of asemic writing and heat scanning open a conversation on language existing outside of words. Our individual practices meet as we both use language to research language itself. We will move between reading our on-going written dialogue on language and material transformation, sharing our methods of doing artistic research. As one person reads, the other responds materially. Material reading is also research on and through dialogue, that simultaneously occupies both material processes, and the way we write and speak to each other.
________________________________________________________________
* SCOPE FOR ADDITIONAL SESSION IN GARDEN
________________________________________________________________
* SCOPE FOR ADDITIONAL SESSION IN GARDEN
________________________________________________________________
* SCOPE FOR ADDITIONAL SESSION IN GARDEN
________________________________________________________________
Sabina Holzer | LIQUID JOURNEYS III
LOCATION: GARDEN / DURATION: 90 MINUTES
What happens when the technological divisions between urban culture and nature, between water and land, are understood as fluid conditions? Sabina Holzer investigates how water writes the land and, by relating it to the fluids of the human body, unfolds transitional spaces and states. The practices she offers are based on movement & touch. Movement here means the mobility of bodies as well as micro-movements such as breathing, heartbeat etc. With a special awareness of liquids, a set of practices is proposed to explore how the environment “writes” the us / humans and more-than-human-actors as acts of poetry, humor, and care. What happens if we include (intra-act with) these writings in our bodies of texts.
________________________________________________________________
* SCOPE FOR ADDITIONAL SESSION IN GARDEN
________________________________________________________________
Rob Flint | This Is Not a Picture (Projected)
DURATION: 30 MINUTES
A performance using audiovisual software, with sound and image projection, creating a repetitious rhythmic and immersive experience beginning from words describing experimental procedures for measuring human visual perception. Somewhere between a PowerPoint presentation and a VJ set, with unlikely aspirations toward opera, the work reflects poetically on the formal language of scientific publication as well as the world of networked misdirection and syncretic reconnection created by the digital fusion of different sensory modes, and the widening human capacity to redirect or translate the experience of causation in the virtual world. (With thanks to Denis Schluppeck for plundered publications)
________________________________________________________________
* SCOPE FOR ADDITIONAL SESSION IN GARDEN
Simon Roloff | Small fate data: Or how to make an artificial neural network mourn the disappeared
DURATION: 20 MINUTES
Simon Roloff will present poems generated by an artificial neural network with entries from the US national database for missing persons. This collection contains about 23.000 personal descriptions and short accounts of the circumstances of disappearance starting from around 1900. The system is finetuned relying on the help of clickworkers to generate a unique elegy for each person in the database. In expressing absence and uncertainty, they not only draw attention to the invisible human work of training large language models, but also to the way digital technology changes our relationship to language.
EVENING GATHERING
19.00 - 21.00
LOCATION: INDOORS I
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
Anouk Hoogendoorn & Mariana Renthel| Words as Matter: A Scribble in Thinking
LOCATION: GARDEN / DURATION: 45 MINUTES
This encounter proposes to explore words as material, around the movements of scribbles, which enable language to be entered as a realm of expanded meaning through bodily experience. Within this exploration, operations/actions, flexibility, dissection, merging, and malleability will come as tools. We will delve into trans-lingua and the in-betweens of language to witness the process of thoughts into scribbles. Unravelling gestures, as they move between drawings and poetic expressions, through rhythms, sounds, and traces of intertwined shared narratives, we invite each participant to both witness and craft this ephemeral artistic communion of thinking.
________________________________________________________________
Litó Walkey | indexical writings with This, Fantasies, Art
LOCATION: INOOORS II + GARDEN / DURATION: 60 MINUTES
This, Fantasies, Art * - a choreographic publication - investigates public formats to extend actions and felt durations that develop through transversal reformulation practices of reading, writing, and performing. This session proposes to meet the project through its own processes, by exploring indexical writing. How do compositions made by indexical writing support processes to appear as the porous, provisional, permeable, and collective things they were (and are)? Our work will consider lateral reading paths that double as document and invitation, also in relation to poetics of unendingness.
PARALLEL SESSIONS
09.00 - 10.30
________________________________________________________________
Delphine Chapuis Schmitz and Ines Marita Schaerer | Sensing Making Senses
LOCATION: INDOORS I / DURATION: 90 MINUTES
How to practise languaging from sensory encounters? How to unfold sense(s) from sensing and aside from pre-given meanings? We invite the participants in this practice sharing session to activate sensing relationalities revolving around the French word “écart” – as it names a transitional space from which similarities and differences emerge in entanglements. The shared exploration starts with a somatic practice to activate the skin as a field for sensing in-between, it merges into individual writing and exchange through voicing, it ends with a collective reflection to assess the process experienced.
________________________________________________________________
Lena Séraphin | Collective Writing in Public Space
LOCATION: MEET AT ZFF / DURATION: 90 MINUTES
The aim of this collective attempt at writing is to position ourselves in shared spaces and reciprocated texts, and to study how we respond to public space by notating what we observe not only with eyesight but with all bodily senses. This live-writing has a performative quality as the writers are being observed themselves. Since it is undoable to write down everything that happens in one’s surroundings, the writing becomes a series of choices. The workshop is about learning to be aware of these choices and questions if there is a possibility that the physical senses perceive in a categoric mode.
FOOD + DRINK
17.30 - 19.00
________________________________________________________________
Sharing conversation + eating together : informal gathering at ZFF (Food + drink provided).
PARALLEL SESSIONS
14.00 - 15.30
________________________________________________________________
Julia Calver | Vocal Recall: a listening and voicing workshop
LOCATION: INDOORS I / DURATION 90 MINUTES
Remembering a voice, I hear the sounds of a friend’s speech, their tonality, pitch, sometimes their intonational patterning, but I can’t hear them speak words.
In this workshop we will test how other voices can be virtually present through sonic slippages or transmitted affectively through non-verbal noises. We will work with practices of remembering familiar voices, experimenting with internal vocal reconstructions, and find analogous vocal experiences in silent reading practices. Combining silent reading and vocal recollection we will work towards polyvocal sensations in reading and listening.
PARALLEL SESSIONS
11.00 - 11.45
________________________________________________________________
Elke Mark | Expanding existing vocabulary and terminology for describing touch and felt dimensions of aesthetic experience
LOCATION: INDOORS 1 / DURATION: 45 MINUTES
In order to explore the yet unrecognised dimensions of our thinking and perception, Elke Mark will share a tactile-performative research practice, which involves a micro-phenomenological approach (Petitmengin). As one of the practices of Embodied Critical Thinking, felt experience is considered a tool to explore the entanglement of tacit knowledge in the background levels of perception. By focusing on a singular moment of sensory anchored experience, micro-phenomenological practice provides access to find words for previously unnoticed felt dimensions of experience.
PARALLEL SESSIONS
12.00 - 12.45
________________________________________________________________
Erika Tsimbrovsky | Living Open Diary
LOCATION: INDOORS I / DURATION: 45 MINUTES
Erika Tsimbrovsky will be offering an inquiry into an embodied experimental writing practice in combination with art-dance as a collective interactive score-performance-ritual Living open diary. This practice focuses on intimacy, differences, and overlaps in sharing space. We will explore diary-like writing with paper, twigs, and audio-recorded paper. The practice will include: tuning; playing/engaging with materials, each other, and space (asemic writing process), and readings. This practice explores the concept of asemic as a quality of the intersection of movement, art, and text in diary-like performances. The asemic refers to cultural ways of knowing that do not have clear semiotic meaning within empowered systems.
* Image: Izabella Borzecka, Sara Kaaman, Lito Walkey, ‘Publishing as Choreography’/ The Reading Edge Library, 2022. Photo by Izabella Borzecka
________________________________________________________________
Emílio Remelhe | OXIDOXIA
DURATION: 10-MINUTE GLIMPSE
Oxidoxia is a work and an exhibition [2022, Serpente – Contemporary Art Gallery – Porto, Portugal] bonding the practices of drawing, writing and performativity. Supported by disciplinary domains such as semantics, morphology, semiotics or linguistic pragmatics, the work is composed of three units, Condignition, Oxilexicon and Doxamorph, and unfolds in an analogical relationship between the chemical combustion reaction and dialogical action. Between the release of heat and the freedom of expression, it is an invitation to reflect on linguistics, psychological and social tension, the use and abuse of language, opinion, cancel culture and censorship.
_______________________________________________________________
Wiebke Leister | Echoes and Callings - A Hannya Manifesto
DURATION: 10 MINUTES
A short joint reading marks the final ‘gathering’ of Convocation II.
________________________________________________________________
* SCOPE FOR ADDITIONAL SESSION IN GARDEN
GATHERING
12.15 - 13.00
LOCATION: INDOORS I
________________________________________________________________
Gabriele Gervickaite | Scratching Memory
DURATION: 10-MINUTE GLIMPSE
In her artistic exploration, Gabriele Gervickaite delves into the memories stored within her body, encompassing her emotions, both painful and joyful, her very identity, as well as her experiences with disability and queerness. Ultimately, these intricate emotions transform into vivid manifestos. Gervickaite will share an installation that she did within a shipping container during an art residency in Dresden, Germany in 2021. This installation took shape as a direct response to the profound physical isolation we all experienced during the pandemic.
PARALLEL SESSIONS
10.30 - 12.00
________________________________________________________________
adO/Aptive | If Eye were Anding
LOCATION: GARDEN / DURATON: 90 MINUTES
adO/Aptive presents ‘If Eye were Anding’, a 10-scene multi-perspective script written in early 2023. The play has four central characters who, although situated in own and divergent times and spaces, have liminal encounters with each other. Dido, Hunter, Maria and Genesis exist from 80 BC to 30 after the big Bliss. For Convocation II, adO/Aptive invite participants to step on their stage elements and embody them through the game that they have prepared.
PARALLEL SESSIONS
09.00 - 10.00
________________________________________________________________
Ileana Gherghina & Bogdan Mihai Florea | Second Language Actor
LOCATION: INDOORS I / DURATION 60 MINUTES
Ileana and Bogdan research new methods of training actors who use English as a second language. Combining performance art and actor training, they enable less restrictive approaches to second language acting. They devise creative ways to overcome stereotyping by accent and limitations imposed by required rhythms of speech, poetic meter, pronunciation. Quoting Bogdan’s concept of English-becoming-another-language, we will deliver a practice-based presentation, demonstrating how we apply our research methods to a Shakespearean sonnet. The activity will include a short introduction to the main working methods / concepts / aims, followed by effective practical work and reflection.
________________________________________________________________
Cristiana de Marchi | “The willful creation of error”. An investigation into language accessibility and its circulation
DURATION: 10-MINUTE GLIMPSE
Language-based practices are deeply rooted in my artistic research. Often resorting to the verbal sphere, words are investigated by means of insertion into the structure of physical objects: in this isolation, focus is conduced to their intrinsic, constituent meaning. During “Convocation II”, I will present two long-term and ongoing projects that I have respectively started in 2011 (Black) and in 2017 (Commemorative Stamps). While the Black series addresses social blindness by translating constitutional or universally promoted human rights texts into braille, the Commemorative Stamps, consisting of fabricated sets of stamps, are then activated through fictional correspondences.
________________________________________________________________
The un | common ground collective – Regina Dürig, Marinos Koutsomichalis, Phoenix Savage | Something should be eventually found
LOCATION: INDOORS I / DURATION: 30 MINUTES
Something should be eventually found is a performative intervention which draws on theory, intuition, silence, prose, paroxysms, and not necessarily comprehensible articulations of all sorts. As a collective, we are keeping a writing log and meeting regularly to reflect the emerging text(ure). In our performative intervention, we build upon this body of work and actualise it in situ, interlinked with theoretical positions on collaborative settings. Thus, we propose a mode of collective creation and reflection wherein playfulness and poetry substitutes rigor (hopefully) paving the way to new kinds of (non-representational) knowledge through/about language.
_________________ FOLLOWED BY _________________
Barb Macek | Poetical Anamnesis (PA) – Talking with the Crow
DURATION: 30 MINUTES
The Poetical Anamnesis is a technique to investigate the existential dimension of autoimmune diseases. It conceptualises the autoimmune body as a modified and therefore poetic body. The symptoms of the disease are read as signs of an organism transforming into a poetical means of world modification. The aim of the PA is to capture these signs. The crow is the agent poétique within the PA. It is a mythical messenger with the ability to wander between the worlds. In a hospital environment it is conspicuously misplaced – challenging the clinical environment, inviting transgressions. How will the patient react to its presence?
FINAL GATHERING
13.00 - 14.00
WITH FOOD + DRINK
________________________________________________________________
Over lunch together, we invite conversation and reflection on the Convocation II event, with a specific focus on looking forward. Towards an expanded and expanding community of practice through the evolution of live constellations of interest and focus within the field of language-based artistic research: what emergent 'thematic nodes', what attractions and resonances, what affinities or urgencies, can be identified within the field of language-based artistic research? How might we collectively support the emergence of different species of proximity and community within the field of expanded language-based practices? How can we together support different modes of relationality and connectivity [gravitational pulls and resonant affinities] within the field of expanded language-based practices, further ways for generating mutual support and resource?
Convocation II will officially end at 14.00.
THEMATIC NODES (SELF-ORGANISED MEETINGS)
14.00 - 16.00
________________________________________________________________
We have allowed time after Convocation II for optional, informal and self-organised meetings within the grounds of ZFF. This could be for existing groups or ‘thematic nodes’ to meet together, or for newly emergent collaborations and conversations to take place.
________________________________________________________________
* SCOPE FOR ADDITIONAL SESSION IN GARDEN
Gretel Acosta is a scholar with a focus on Latin-American and Latinx contemporary literature and visual arts. Her academic journey began with a BA in Art History from the University of Havana, where she explored conceptual art in Cuban culture. Building on her expertise, she earned an MA in Languages, Literatures, and Cultures from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Currently, she is a Ph.D. Candidate at Tulane University, researching text-based works and literature within the art world. Gretel's notable curatorial accomplishments include exhibitions in Cuba and the United States. She has also contributed extensively to various publications and presented her research at multiple conferences.
Louise Adkins’ practice explores the intersection between performance and the documentation of historical events. She often works with collections, archives, libraries and heritage sites and is interested in the performative possibilities of these histories and the narrative potential inherent in re-visioning them. Adkins is interested in the slippage between contemporary culture and historicity devising performance works that draw on cinematic and theatrical tropes. She works with audio descriptive writing methods alongside montage and repetition to generate meta-narrative performance scripts that articulate multiple and conflicting contemporaneous readings of historical collections and heritage sites.
adO/Aptive is a collective based in Vienna and active in central Europe. It foments critical thinking, potential action, communication and Otherness by adopting techniques that situate adaptive processes. adO/Aptive organises reading groups, conferences and workshops and produces collective art projects at the intersection of performance, theory and speculation. For "If Eye were Anding" adO/Aptive assembled: Barnabás Bácsi, Mel Sasha Berger, Martin Gius, Melanie Haberl, Daniel Hüttler, Saara Hukka & Janina Weißengruber.
Ruth Anderwald & Leonhard Grond are visual artists, artist-curators, artist-researchers, and professors for the PhD programme (PhD in Art) at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. In the last decades they have conducted several arts-based research projects such as ART WORKS! European Culture of Resistance and Liberation (Erasmus+) or Navigating Dizziness Together (FWF-PEEK). Their work has been exhibited internationally, e.g., at Centre Pompidou, Paris, Himalayas Art Museum, Shanghai, Tate Modern, London, Whitechapel Gallery, London, Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art; museum in progress, Vienna.
Katrina Brown is a choreographer with a hybrid research-based practice across movement, drawing, writing and still-and-moving image, presenting work as live performance scores and material-digital pages. She is Senior Lecturer Choreography at Falmouth University.
Julia Calver is an artist and writer working with experimental linguistic morphologies and reading practices. Recent talks and workshops include Vocal Recall, Sheffield Hallam Fine Art Project Space, S1, Sheffield and accompanying publication in MAP, (2022), Reading Syntactics Together for Sharing Text, Pro Artibus Foundation and Åbo Akademi University, Vasa, (2022) and Apostrophe Plural, CARPA 7: Elastic Writing in Artistic Research, Uniarts, Helsinki (2021). Julia is currently completing a PhD at Sheffield Hallam University, UK.
Beverley Carruthers is an artist, writer, lecturer, and researcher, exploring female experience, through the creative process. This is navigated through employing photography, generative text, sound art, performance, and film. She is a Wysing Centre studio artist and a senior lecturer in photography at London College of Communication, where I co-run the Writing Photographs research project with Wiebke Leister (Royal College of Art) investigating the many constellations of image and text, particularly in the installation context.
Emma Cocker’s research attends to the embodied dimension of artistic process through a nexus of experimental, performative and collaborative language-based approaches (including reading and conversation). Her writing is published in Reading/Feeling, 2013; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013; The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, 2018; Writing Choreography: Extending the Conventions of Dance, 2023, and the solo collections, The Yes of the No, 2016, and forthcoming How Do You Do?, 2023. She is a writer-artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University, UK.
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 making sense, 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.
Cordula Daus (D/A) is a writer-artist who works across performance, literary fiction and a general study of feelings. Her artist books and lecture performances have been presented internationally. Currently, Cordula is leading the artistic research Outer Woman at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (co-researchers: Sebastian Bark, [M] Dudeck and Charlotta Ruth, FWF: V 797). In collaboration with Charlotta Ruth she initiated the ongoing art project Questionology. Her novel SEHR is forthcoming.
(D)raft is a writing partnership. It is also a work in progress, and a structure that allows us to stay afloat. Brought together after several Critical Poetics (Nottingham Trent) events, we are Sarah Jackson (NTU), Delphine Grass (Lancaster University), Helena Hunter (NTU), Hannah van Hove (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), and Maria Gil Ulldemolins (Universiteit Hasselt). Starting in 2022, we have developed a shared practice based on models of kinship, in-person and remotely. Atop the priceless, individual, productive gains, our obligation to each other (and to all others) has also led to shared multidisciplinary and rhizomatic work.
Bogdan Florea is an actor/independent researcher, co-founder of Nu Nu Theatre, which supports professional actors who work in a second language English. Bogdan has published in academic journals and presented papers at conferences in UK, Europe, USA.
Ileana Gherghina is an actor/director and performance artist, co-founder of Nu Nu Theatre and curator of Live Art and Performance Group (UK). Ileana's most recent commissions have been for University of Bristol and festivals in Japan, Serbia, Norway, Romania, Germany, Armenia.
Gabrielė Gervickaitė (Gabo), an artist based in Vilnius, Lithuania, is a doctoral candidate in Fine Arts at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. She is also a member of the Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists' Association. Gabo’s artistic practice revolves around using her body as archival material and exploring the influence of constructing norms in contemporary media, social, and political contexts. Alongside her artistic practice, Gervickaitė works as a curator and is involved in socially-engaged arts education.
Sara Gomez (Mexico). Research artist and choreographer. PhD in Philosophy and Theory of the Arts at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Her topics of interest are Studies on Choreography, Word and Politics. She is a professor at the CENIDID Dance Research Master's Program, Mexico. During 2022, she was resident artist in the INprescindibles #49, at La Poderosa, Barcelona; Research Academy, at the Zurich Academy of the Arts, Switzerland; Processes in Dialogue at La Mecedora, Mexico.
Miriana Faieta (1996) is an Italian singer and songwriter. Her research investigates the signifying potential of the voice in singing and improvising, with a special focus on words. After a Bachelor’s degree in Languages and a Master’s degree in Jazz singing, she is now Subject-Matter Expert of Fundamentals of music semiology at Conservatory “L. D’Annunzio” of Pescara. She also guides participative vocal labs on the relationship between the voice and the mother tongue.
Rob Flint is an artist who explores the relationship between different forms of sensory experience, and how these can complement and confound one another, especially through actions of the voice. His work appears in different contexts of experimental sound and music and art, in galleries and performance venues. He has participated in some previous actions of the Language-based Artistic Research (Special Interest) Group including Convocation I and Practice Sharing I and II.
Sabina Holzer is a body-based artist working in the field of expanded choreography and creates performances, dances, & text(ures) in collaborative ways with artists such as Alix Eynaudi, Jack Hauser, Katrin Hornek, Elisabeth Schäfer, Jeroen Peters a.o. She explores languages embedded in bodies and in the geo-historically located and informed memories & futures. Her investigations unfold in transdisciplinary performances and interventions in public spaces, galleries, museums & theaters, (such as: Hidden Museum, dOCUMETA (13), ImPulsTanz, Tanzquartier Wien a.o.). She publishes in various medias.
Anouk Hoogendoorn is an artistic researcher, who was part of the PEERS ’22/’23 cohort, a pre-PHD programme at the Department of Performing Arts and Film at Zurich University of the Arts. Anouk studied Image and Language (BFA) at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and Artistic Research (rMA) at the University of Amsterdam, and has a practice with texts, textile works, sketches, and sounds that always have an important collaborative and experimental orientation to them.
Sophie Hope’s work is often developed with others through the format of devised workshops exploring subjects such as art and politics in the year 1984, physical and emotional experiences of immaterial work, stories people tell about socially engaged art commissions and the ethics of employability in the creative industries. Current work she is collaborating on includes Manual Labours with Jenny Richards, Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse with Owen Kelly, 1984 Dinners.
Benjamin Jenner is currently in the process of completing a fine art, practice-led PhD entitled Blindfolded Navigation as Perceptual Ecology: The Re-Markable Space of Poetic Form. The objective of this research is (1), to explore how, in the absence of vision, embodiment and ulterior sensory phenomena might rewrite the conditions of object intra-actions; and (2), once rewritten, to employ the weak strength of these textual, dialogic knowledge forms as a means of disturbing perceptual and institutional norms.
Aleksandra Komsta and Cecilie Fang are both artists working with the performativity of language. They are both students of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, and their work materializes across mediums such as performance, installation and spoken and written words. Their practices meet in the material research within language. How language is embodied and shapes bodies. And in that shaping, where it leaves the speaking, writing, reading and listening body.
Linnea Langfjord Kristensen is an award-winning artist working between text, performance and film supported by scenographic installations. Her work has been shown and published nationally and internationally including Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Cockpit Theatre (London), Martin Asbæk Gallery and Theatre Får302 (Copenhagen). She's a Teaching Fellow at Coventry University in Art and Media, and holds an MA from the Royal College of Art, London and a BA in Fine Arts from Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam.
Wiebke Leister is a German artist and researcher living in London. Her work investigates the intersection of photography, writing and theatre by way of developing a performative understanding of how movement enters the structure of the still image to become the catalyst for an interplay between viewer and imaginary referent. Before teaching at the Royal College of Art, she was Course Leader for MA Photography at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London.
Barb Macek is a writer and artistic researcher. She studied psychology and Art & Science in Vienna. Since 2017 she has presented her poetry-based research projects in artistic and scientific contexts.
Prices: Award of Excellence of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science 2018, Annual Prize of the Society for Artistic Research 2019.
Single publication: Lykanthropus erythematosus, 2019.
Currently she investigates the meaning of autoimmunity as a PhD candidate at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
Tatjana Macić is a visual artist and writer originally from the country that does not exist any more, and currently based in Amsterdam. She is deploying her artistic practice to blur the boundaries between visual art, theory, exhibition-making, education and language. Work was shown at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Venice Biennale Collateral Events and de Appel in Amsterdam. Tatjana is a lecturer of artistic research at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague.
Cristiana de Marchi is an Italian-Lebanese visual artist and writer who lives and works in Dubai. Her work has been exhibited at the New York University, New York; Louvre Abu Dhabi; Mexican Cultural Institute, Washington, DC; Villa Vassilieff, Paris; Sharjah Art Museum, and at the 1st Yinchuan Biennale, China (2016); Santa Cruz Biennale 2016, and the Singapore Biennial 2013. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Artistic Research Programme at the University of applied Arts, Vienna.
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.
Elke Mark works as an artist and researcher in performance art and processual textile art on concepts such as sensual knowledge, movement, memory and dialogue. She has received various residencies and grants and has exhibitions and solo performances in Europe. As part of the PAErsche Performance Art Network, she continuously develops the Open Source Session format and has initiated international BRISE° Performance Art Festivals. Elke Mark teaches at the European University of Flensburg.
Adelheid Mers works through Performative Diagrammatics, a discursive and artistic practice that explores epistemic diversity and includes elements of facilitation, performance, installation, and video. Work takes place at conferences, exhibitions, retreats and other convenings, which in turn become occasions for addressing it through writing and publication. Mers is a professor and currently serves as the chair of the department of Arts Administration and Policy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Antrianna Moutoula (GR, 1994) lives and works in Amsterdam. Primarily language-based, her work spans performance, film, radio, and writing. Driven by the desire to articulate the continuous present, her current research focuses on nonstop languaging, an autotheoretical performance practice, through which she aims to rework the confinements of knowledge production within artistic academic discourse. Moutoula's practice is currently supported by the Artist Start Grant of the Mondriaan Fonds (NL).
Henry Mulhall is a practice-based PhD student at Birkbeck, University of London. His research looks at how constellations of practice form between art organisations and community groups in the Union Street area of Plymouth. He works as an art evaluator and since 2019 he has collaborated with Sophie Hope on the evaluation of BE PART a European network of organisations collaborating to better understand how to further participation in arts and culture.
Anna Nygren is a writer, playwright, literary scholar and translator, also working with textiles and other material. Based in Gothenburg, Sweden. They are autistic and queer, with a research interest in textual desires, horses and misplacements. Among their literary works “Allt jag äger och har” (it-lit, 2022) and “Nathalie” (Dockhaveri Förlag, 2023) are the most recent. Anna works as a teacher in literary composition at Gothenburg University and is a PhD student in literature at Åbo Akademi.
Elena Peytchinska is a visual artist, stage designer, musician, and Lecturer at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Thomas Ballhausen is a poet, philosopher, curator, and Senior Artist at the University Mozarteum Salzburg. Together they explore the connections between space and language in a variety of international conference participations, film festivals and exhibitions. Their most recent publication, “Fiction Fiction” (2023), addresses topics of spatial storytelling within the framework of language-based artistic research.
Emílio Remelhe is an artist and writer based in Porto, Portugal. Professor at ESAD - College of Art and Design Matosinhos and invited professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Porto. Teaching Drawing, Narratives and Creative Writing. Degree in Painting, MA in Drawing, Practice and Theory, Ph.D. Researcher at ESAD-IDEA - Research in Design and Art and collaborating researcher at i2ADS-Faculty of Fine Arts at University of Porto.
Mariana Renthel: Raised in the outskirts of Buenos Aires- Argentina, Mg. Mariana Renthel studied arts at Universidad Nacional de las Artes where she graduated as Printmaking Professor. After migrating several times to a couple European countries, where she also studied and produced as a grantee, she settled for some time in Colombia with a continuous practice both as artist and as a Professor, at the Universidad de Antioquia. Her interests revolve around organic materials, language and process.
Simon Roloff, PhD is an author, literary and media scholar. He studied at Humboldt University in Berlin and at the Leipzig Literature Institute. He obtained his doctorate with a thesis on Robert Walser and was a junior professor at the Institute for Literary Writing and Literary Studies at the University of Hildesheim. He currently works on a project about code philologies at the Leuphana University Lüneburg. His most recent book is Extension of the coaching zone (Bielefeld 2023), forthcoming is an introduction to Digital Literature (with Hannes Bajohr).
Charlotta Ruth (S/A) works with choreography and ludic structures. Her works takes a media independent but site and context-specific approach ranging between stage, gallery, public space, institutional in-between spaces and online. At the University of Applied Arts Vienna, she co-lead the research project Archives in Practice together with Olivia Jaques & Marlies Surtmann (INTRA). In collaboration with Cordula Daus she initiated the ongoing art project Questionology.
Lena Séraphin is a writer-artist based in Helsinki. Her postdoctoral research Sharing Text at the Faculty of Education and Welfare Studies, Åbo Akademi University (2020-2023) was an exploration on collective writing in public space and site-specific publishing as a research practice. She holds an MA from Goldsmiths’ and a doctorate from Aalto University, and teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts, Helsinki.
Ph.D. candidate in Performance Studies at the University of California, Davis, Erika Tsimbrovsky is a choreographer/multidisciplinary artist. Her research highlights multimedia dance-installation, dance, visual art, and text interplay, and new relationships for the artist-performer-audience. She is interested in dance artists’ writings, especially their essays and personal, intimate texts. Bodily explorations of new languages and modes of communication created by entities muted and unrecognized by society are at the heart of Tsimbrovsky’s art research-practice.
The un | common ground collective, which was founded in 2021, develops decolonial, non-western, and off-centered poetic practices that challenge power imbalances through embracing silence, multilingualism and un-understanding. Regina Dürig (Switzerland) is a writer, performer and adjunct professor in creative writing. Marinos Koutsomichalis (Greece/Cyprus) is an artist, scholar, and creative technologist. Phoenix Savage (USA) is an artist (sculpture, design and photography) and a contributing member of the Osara community (Nigeria).
Litó Walkey (GR/CAN) is a Berlin-based artist whose work operates collaboratively through writing and choreography. Her performance and publishing projects engage with how collective structures of (re-) writing and reading (-across) enable affective circulations that energize sense (and self) drifting. She performed and taught internationally with Chicago-based performance group Goat Island and held a long-standing teaching position at HZT (Inter-University Center for Dance) Berlin. She is currently a PhD researcher in Performance Practices at Gothenburg University.
Kai Ziegner, PhD (born 1975 in Plauen/Vogtland (GDR) is a visual artist, author, researcher, lecturer who lives in Berlin. Ziegner studied German literature, political sciences, journalism, photography and fine arts in Leipzig, Berlin and Zurich, holds a master´s degree awarded by Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) and completed a research doctorate in fine arts with distinction at Linz University of Design (UfG). His works often question critical aspects of contemporary history and merge experimental writing and conceptual photography