This session hosted by the SAR Special Interest Group in Language-based Artistic Research (co-founded by Emma Cocker, Alexander Damianisch, Cordula Daus, Lena Séraphin) takes place within the frame of the SAR Conference in Porto. More about the SAR conference HERE.
Language-based Artistic Research describes an emergent field involving approaches to artistic research that are undertaken in and through different language-based practices. This session will introduce the activities of the SIG in Language-based Artistic Research, providing invitation to the wider community of artistic researchers to become involved. It will comprise presentations from different ‘thematic nodes’ – a term used for referring to a group of artistic researchers coming together for engaging with a specific thematic focus, resonant affinity, or a matter of urgency relating to language-based artistic research. Contributions to the programme (in-person and through online content) address diverse language-based issues and questions including – the ethics and politics of language justice as a framework and set of practices for equitable, authentic communication; the relation of languaging and bodying, as well as between voicing and listening, alongside the asemic and ‘eco-asemic’ materiality of language.
RECORDED CONTRIBUTIONS
* In the beckonings of errant attentions // ro heinrich | Katrin Hahner | Edoardo Lomi | fabrice dubosc | Erin Manning | Muckross Lake surrounds, Ireland, Cricket wings, raven wings, underwater lava
* Notes on Neuroqueer Reading Writing Life // Anna Nygren | Elisabeth Hjorth
* Speaking aut* // Anna Nygren | Barb Macek
* withing // Delphine Chapuis Schmitz | Emma Cocker | Laressa Dickey | Sabina Holzer | Ines Marita Schärer | Litó Walkey
* Words as Matter // Mariana Renthel | Erika Tsimbrovsky | Cecilie Fang Jensen | Benjamin Jenner | Danica Maier | Antrianna Moutoula | Anouk Hoogendoorn
* transitory writing in no-one’s land // Emma Cocker | Andrea Coyotzi Borja | Lena Séraphin
LIVE PRESENTATIONS
* The Revolution Will Not Be Monolingual // Jen/Eleana Hofer | Allison Yasukawa
* Onomatopoetic Sound(e)scape: Slides and Slips between Sonances and Symbiosis // Mariella Greil | Werner Moebius | Victor Jaschke | Symbiotic Cultures of Bacteria and Yeast (SCOBY) in the frame of SHAKEN GROUNDS with Lucie Strecker | Peter Kozek | Nikolaus Gansterer
* Pine Pals // Annette Arlander
* Voice/s Voicing // Ruth Anderwald | Miriana Faieta | Bogdan Florean | Ileana Gherghina, Cristiana de Marchi | Elke Mark | Kai Ziegner
2024 © Videostill: Victor Jaschke / Performance: Mariella Greil, Lucie Strecker & SCOBYs in the frame ofShaken Grounds: Seismography of Precarious Presences
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The Revolution Will Not Be Monolingual // Jen/Eleana Hofer and Allison Yasukawa
Tra- means “across,” so how many forms of "across" can we come up with? ~ Cecilia Vicuña
We live inside translingual rhythms using their resonances and harmonics as generative strategies of political engagements, transformative pedagogies, and writings/artworks. Language’s many forms, formations, and modes serve as our material to undo the false frames of language dominance and monolingualism. Our engagements are informed by language justice: a framework and set of practices for equitable, authentic communication. We ask: How does language shape us? When might we shapeshift to embody its multiple forms of acrossness? Where are language barriers linked to imbalances of power and privilege in our classrooms, creative spaces, and the wider world? Where do we find the potential for radical unbarriering? How can we counteract colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy by transiting across, through, and under language? How do we listen, perceive, and communicate translingually to imagine other possible worlds?
Onomatopoetic Sound(e)scape – Slides and Slips between Sonances and Symbiosis // Mariella Greil | Werner Moebius | Victor Jaschke | Symbiotic Cultures of Bacteria and Yeast (SCOBY) in the frame of SHAKEN GROUNDS with Lucie Strecker | Peter Kozek | Nikolaus Gansterer
We continue to explore the theme of our node Onomatopoetic Sound(e)scape. During the SAR Forum in Tilburg 2024 our focus was on Slides and Slips between Sound and Speech, and we introduced the Amaryllisation project. We continued our investigations on entangled soundwordings and also managed to expand our node from two humans, plant and audiovisual devices to a collaboration with more humans and this time a whole symbiotic community. We will therefore focus this contribution on Slides and Slips between Sonances and Symbiosis, paying tribute to the theme of the conference as well as the material agents we collaborate with.
“Kombucha mats are unique symbiotic systems where over sixty species of yeasts and bacteria cooperate [*]. A kombucha is an example of a protomulticellularity — an organism combined of multiple species each one pursuing a common goal of prolonging a life time of the collective organism.” [1]
1. (Kombucha electronics (preprint 8.2.2023) Andrew Adamatzkya,d, Giuseppe Tarabella b , Neil Phillips a , Alessandro Chiolerioc,a, Passquale D’Angelo b , Anna Nicolaidou a , Georgios Ch. Sirakoulisd,a) the Article refers to the work of the biologist Michael Levin (2012, 2014, 2019, 2021) * A. May, S. Narayanan, J. Alcock, A. Varsani, C. Maley, A. Aktipis, Kombucha: a novel model system for cooperation and conflict in a complex multi-species microbial ecosystem, PeerJ 7 (2019) e7565.
In the beckonings of errant attentions // ro heinrich (filmmaker) | Katrin Hahner (sonic artist) | Edoardo Lomi (co-writer for this contribution) | fabrice dubosc (co-fabulator and activator) | Erin Manning (interlocutor; human voice featured in the rough-cut film) | Muckross Lake surrounds, Ireland (interlocutor featured in the rough-cut film), Cricket wings, raven wings, underwater lava (interlocutors in the sounds of the rough-cut film)
Weaving conversations at the end of the world as we know it is a collaborative research and filmmaking practice led by ro heinrich. Staging the refusal to separate the human and the more-than human, world and body, the research explores our critical landscapes at the fertile edges of neurodiversity, blackness and artistic research, addressing our present predicament at the end of the world as we know it.
The Being of Relation is work-in-process towards this project, thinking with Erin Manning whose voice is featured in the rough cut. The title draws on Erin’s forthcoming publication The Being of Relation, published with Intellect Books in September 2025.
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Notes on neuroqueer reading writing life // Anna Nygren | Elisabeth Hjorth
Anna Nygren and Elisabeth Hjorth present a poetic work, which is the starting point for an exploration of what reading can be and an invitation to talk about it. The work is situated between a project in its final stages ("Autistic writing. Reclaiming another mother tongue,") and one that is in a beginning phase ("Artistic reading"). Nygren and Hjorth examine reading as a situation (and what one can do in the work-situation borderland/overlap, how the situation emphasizes the unfinished, the mobile, the process) as well as what makes the situation "artistic" and the ambiguity of reading: as a tool, as an end goal, as open and closed.
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Speaking aut* // Anna Nygren | Barb Macek
We, Anna/Fish and Barb/Bird, started the collaborative project speaking aut* – aut as in aut/istic and aut/oimmune – with the aim of exploring the meaning of living as auts, writing about it in relation to everyday life, in relation to medical discourses about autism and autoimmunity, and in relation to the view of the 'others', the non-auts.
In the context of language-based artistic research, we seek to develop practices that allow for the investigation of the meaning of aut on different layers of our existence. By exchanging our experiences, we set aut to explore new wor(l)ds, experimenting with transgressing boundaries (self - other / human - nonhuman / something - nothing / ...) not only on the level of language, but also on the visual, acoustic, tactile and kinaesthetic levels.
*Speaking out and at the same time speaking as auts, but also speaking in a language called aut
The Being of Relation, work-in-process, ro heinrich, featuring the voice of Erin Manning thinking with friends.
Voice/s Voicing // Ruth Anderwald | Miriana Faieta | Bogdan Florean | Ileana Gherghina | Cristiana de Marchi, Elke Mark | Kai Ziegner
The node Voice/s Voicing explores practices and resources concerning voice and voicing in artistic research. As a heterogeneous group of artist-researchers, we will share and explore the resonances voices and voicings create with, alongside and for artistic research.
Among the perspectives we are focussing on are the following questions: What does it mean to give a voice to artistic research? How do multiple voices, languages and perspectives translate into a resonance of meanings? What does voice do in remembrance? Could remembrance translate as a resonance? How can addressing (repressed) memories promote their processing and initiate a fruitful intergenerational dialogue? How does the shift from voicing to listening add to our understanding of voice? What happens in between voicing and listening? What spaces open up?
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Pine tree by Essingeleden // Annette Arlander
(with special greetings from a pine in Bagarmossen and a pine in Rome)
This thematic node is a playful experiment, an invitation to collaboration as part of the project Pondering with Pines. The main concern of the project was how to recognize and engage with beings that we tend to consider wholly ‘other’, such as pine trees. Two pine pals exchanged letters with the Pine by Essingeleden. Although the project is officially over, more pine pals are welcome…
withing // Delphine Chapuis Schmitz | Emma Cocker | Laressa Dickey | Sabina Holzer | Ines Marita Schärer | Litó Walkey
withing is an ongoing, durational collaboration exploring the intra-action of bodying and languaging through shared practice. How does languaging affect bodying? How does bodying affect languaging? Since 2023, we have been creating shared conditions for our mutual exploration. A first stage (January - June 2024) was dedicated to the devising, experimenting, and sharing of scores through the rhythm of rotation based on a bi-monthly cycle. The second stage (January - May 2025) revisits the scores of the first stage, focusing this time on reflections, remembrances, and resonances.
While the process draws on uncertainty and trust, the iterative approach creates conditions for the share-ability and transfer-ability of our explorations. We experience(d) this as a practice of minor gestures towards an aesthetics of co-existence. As we are moving together-apart into a community of multiple resonances, the heterogeneity which emerges breathes a mutual responsiveness and leaves resonating space for the specific circumstances that each of us is working & living in. We engage the scores in our daily lives, inserting poetic lines of flight that enhance awareness of our bodies, our surroundings and thought processes.
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Words as Matter // Mariana Renthel | Erika Tsimbrovsky | Cecilie Fang Jensen | Benjamin Jenner | Danica Maier | Antrianna Moutoula | Anouk Hoogendoorn
During May 2024, Anouk wrote letters to the members of Words as Matter in a park, guided by the wind in an open collaboration with the air’s uncanny currents. These traces, shaped by movement and chance, became messages to the members of the group: Mariana, Erika, Cecilie, Benjamin, Danica, Antrianna.
For research purposes, with a playful and creative approach, the group responded with videos, echoing the interplay between intention and elemental forces. This asemic exchange reimagined writing as a dialogue beyond human language. The wind, as co-author, left its mark alongside Anouk’s gestures, while the videos extended the conversation into new mediums and other entities.
As an open experiment, one might invite a force—light, water, sound—to shape letters, filming the process as it unfolds.
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transitory writing in no one's land // Emma Cocker | Andrea Coyotzi Borja | Lena Séraphin
transitory writing in no one’s land is an artistic research project that explores how the relational aspects of collective writing might create conditions for the emergence of inclusive spaces. The project seeks to diversify artistic research and its corresponding writerly methods by developing practices of writing that focus on collective, embodied, performative, and multi-lingual approaches to language. It sets out to transform the solitary act of writing towards a collective experiential practice, bridging the corporeal and cerebral. transitory writing in no one’s land explores how situated writing practices might open possibilities for not only writing but also for reading as a co-creative and participatory act. This interdisciplinary research project is structured as a transnational itinerary involving schools, art centres and universities in Finland, Mexico and Spain.
transitory writing in no one’s land is supported by the Kone foundation.
https://writinginpublic.space/
Instagram: transitory_writing
BIOGRAPHIES
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Ruth Anderwald is an artist-researcher focusing on voices of dizziness, uncertainty and unpredictability and guest professor with the ARC Artistic Research Center, mdw University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (on-dizziness.com).
Annette Arlander, DA, is former professor in performance art and theory and in artistic research at University of the Arts Helsinki, and Stockholm University of the Arts. Her research interests are artistic research, performance-as-research and the environment. Her artwork moves between performance art, media art and environmental art. See https://annettearlander.com
Delphine Chapuis Schmitz (F/CH) works as an artist-writer, and researcher. Her research focuses on embodied practices of making sense, the po(ï)ethical potential of languages, and exploring relationalities in sensory entanglements. Developing a relational approach to writing lies at the heart of her work, which involves various collaborative constellations of making-thinking from a transversal perspective. www.dchapuis-schmitz.com
Emma Cocker (UK) is a writer-artist whose research unfolds at the threshold between writing/art, involving diverse process-oriented, dialogic-collaborative and aesthetic-poetic approaches to working with and through language. Her writing is published in Reading/Feeling, 2013; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013; Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line; and the solo collections, The Yes of the No, 2016, and How Do You Do?, 2025. She is an Associate Professor in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University, UK. https://not-yet-there.blogspot.com/
Doctor of Arts Andrea Coyotzi Borja is an artist researcher based in Helsinki. Her practice focuses on everyday encounters and the quiet presence of everyday objects; using media such as video, sound, installation, writing, and drawing. She has long explored the infraordinary; the subtle, often overlooked aspects of daily life through both artistic work and research including her doctoral dissertation at Aalto University. www.andreacoyotziborja.com
Alexander Damianisch heads the Department Support Art and Research at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. He is a member of the executive board of the Angewandte Interdisciplinary Laboratory and serves on the representative board of the European League of Institutes of the Arts (ELIA). Previously, he designed the Programme for Arts-based Research at the Austrian Science Fund and founded the Zentrum Fokus Forschung.
Cordula Daus (DE/A) is a writer-artist and Elise-Richter-PEEK fellow at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Her work is concerned with questions of place, sexuality, body and language. Often it takes the shape of semifictional institutions and artist publications that unfold over several years and in interdisciplinary collaborations. Her current postdoctoral artistic research outerwoman (FWF: V 797) develops alternative imaginaries around pregnancy and reproduction beyond the family. Cordula's novel Sehr has been published with Ritter Verlag in 2024.
https://corduladaus.com/ ; https://outerwoman.xyz/
Laressa Dickey (US/SE) is a dance artist, writer, and bodyworker based in Stockholm whose recent projects explore the politics of care, the effects of state violence on the human body, and space junk. She’s the author of four poetry books including Syncopations and Twang. Together with sound artist Andrea Steves, she published Radio Graveyard Orbit, a speculative book about space junk. She’s a member of the performative collaboration MISLEADING SUBJECTS and teaches occasionally at Stockholm University of the Arts. http://www.laressadickey.com/site/
fabrice dubosc is a therapist working in the cracks where mourning and resistance to the present open thresholds. He collaborated for over twenty years with projects aimed at depathologising migratory traumas. Recent books: Landings and Shipwrecks – Cultural Resistance and Mourning (2016), Dreaming the Earth, the Troll in the Anthropocene (2020).
Miriana Faieta is a singer and improviser investigating the relationship between singing and language in choral improvisation practices. She is a PhD student in the docARTES programme (Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts & Orpheus Instituut, www.mirianafaieta.com)
Cecilie Fang Jensen is an anti-disciplinary artist from China and Denmark based in The Hague. Raised between Mandarin, English, and Danish, she meditates on the power behind literacy, translation, and language access. Through performance, writing, and micro performances of materials, she explores alternative ways of languaging and creates work embodying speculative linguistic ecosystems.
Bogdan Florea & Ileana Gherghina are actor-researchers & founders of Nu Nu Theater.
Mariella Greil works in the field of artistic research and dance, Senior Artist at Angewandte Performance Laboratory & Elise-Richter-PEEK Fellow (FWF) at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. She published the monograph Being in Contact – Encountering a Bare Body (2021) and the anthology Bare Bodies – Thresholding Life with de Gruyter. https://mariellagreil.net/
Katrin Hahner moves, makes and sings exploring communication and relation within animated worlds. Her multidisciplinary practice grows in and between visual arts, music and theatre. She is an alumni of Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart, and Postgraduate Studies at Kunsthochschule Berlin Weissensee, and currently a collaborator of the PRATT NY Mindfulness Collaboratory research cohort. https://www.katrinhahner.com/
ro heinrich is an artist-researcher working with grammars of relationality through spoken and unspoken languages. Through (recorded) conversations and collaborations, their practice is multidisciplinary, with an emphasis on film and book making. ro is beginning a PhD in artistic research with Erin Manning, at Concordia (Montreal) and participates in several engaged study groups.
Elisabeth Hjorth is a writer and professor in Literary Composition at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg. Her literary and academic practice focuses on female autobiography, language/power, neurodiversity and autistic poetics. She holds a PhD in Ethics from Uppsala University. 2021- 2023 she was the project leader for the interdisciplinary research project ”Autistic Writing: Reclaiming Reloading Another Mother Tongue”, financed by the Swedish Research Council.
Jen/Eleana Hofer is a poet, translator, social justice interpreter, teacher, facilitator, and urban cyclist whose work lives at the intersections of language justice and disability justice. They live on unceded Tongva land in Los Angeles where they do language justice advocacy and organizing.
channeltransmitrepeat.com and antenaantena.org
Benjamin Jenner is an artist researching the relationship between language and experience. They devise collaborative sensory engagements involving walking, drawing, site-writing, and dialogic exchange — often undertaken in the absence of vision — to generate non-teleological interpretations of causality. In 2024, Benjamin completed a practice-led PhD at the University of Leeds, UK.
Sabina Holzer is a body-based artist working in the field of expanded choreography. She creates performances, dances, & texts in collaborative ways, that explore ecologies of human and more than human agencies. Her artistic investigations are hosted internationally in theaters, galleries, museums & site-specific events. www.cattravelsnotalone.at
Anouk Hoogendoorn is an artistic researcher that works with text, textile, and performance. Their practice is oriented to the collective and experimental. Anouk is currently doing a practice-based PhD at Teesside University (UK) and Zurich University of the Arts (CH) which explores the materiality and material conditions of language and sharing.
Victor Jaschke, a filmmaker, and interactor, approaches people as animals, with a provoked basic trust in our essentiality. He is still amazed by the concentrated images that enter the quiet chamber of his camera: what there is to see when looking back! A camera makes love easy. www.victorja.com
Edoardo Lomi studies the performance of transversal movement in urban ecologies. He is trained in social anthropology and material culture and is currently pursuing a PhD in Capitalist Studies at Copenhagen Business School. Edoardo is also a Visiting Researcher at the Institute of Architecture and Culture, Royal Danish Academy.
Barb Macek studied psychology and Art & Science, she completed her doctorate at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in 2023. As a writer and artistic researcher she applies poetry-based practices in bio-philosophical contexts to investigate autoimmune diseases. Her current research project aims at developing a new theory of autoimmunity.
Danica Maier is an artist and researcher exploring material and matter through intersemiotic translation, aspect seeing, and the ‘unrepeating-repeat’. She is interested in creating embodied moments of shifting perspectives, crafting dynamic, layered works that bridge visual, textual, and material modes. She is based in the UK and is Associate Professor in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University.
Erin Manning studies in the interstices of philosophy, aesthetics and politics, concerned, always, about alter-pedagogical and alter-economic practices. Erin is co-founder of the 3 Ecologies project, initiated together with Brian Massumi, and research chair at Concordia University, Montreal. Forthcoming publications include The Being of Relation, Intellect Books, September 2025, and Unsettled, Minor Compositions, 2025/2026.
Ines Marita Schärer (CH), based in Brussels, is a sound artist, writer, performer and fascia practitioner. Their practice derives from somatic research, is informed by the given context, permeable for various forms of knowledge, nourished and driven by thinkers, co-thinkers, collaborators, and allies. They are particularly interested in sensibility and vulnerability as constitutive forces. https://www.inesmarita.ch/
Cristiana de Marchi is an artist and writer investigating the void (University of Applied Arts, Vienna).
Elke Mark is an artistic researcher exploring embodied felt knowledge, listening and wellbeing in co-creative practices (Center for Research on Sustainability and Transformation (CREST) Flensburg. www.elkemark.com
Werner Moebius works with sounds, beats and files in the context of audio culture, sonic and intermedia art in between conceptualisms, contemporary composition, electroacoustic improvisation, electronica and pop. His work ranges from minimalistic soundscapes to weird instrumental poppy tunes or audiovisual concepts in collaborations with artists of differing media. wernermoebius.net
Antrianna Moutoula (GR) lives and works in Amsterdam. Primarily language-based, her artistic work spans performance, film, radio, writing, and installations. Driven by the desire to articulate the continuous present, her current research focuses on the autotheoretical practice of nonstop languaging. By bringing this practice in different contexts she aims to rework the confinements of knowledge production within artistic academic discourse.
Anna Nygren is a queer and neuroqueer artist and researcher living in Gothenburg, Sweden together with Zlatan (a cat). They work with poetry, prose, and playwriting, as well as textile art. As a scholar they work with literature, primarily. Anna works as a teacher in literary composition at Gothenburg University and is a PhD student in literature at Åbo Akademi. Their main interest at the moment are the unhuman qualities and agencies of language, textual/textile desires, horses and misplacements, and: FISH
Mariana Renthel crafts ephemeral dialogues between language, objects, and environments. Her practice—spanning asemic writing, responsive gestures, and other entities-guided mark-making—treats texts as porous encounters. Collaborating with forces like time and chance, she documents these exchanges in different mediums probing how meaning unravels and reforms beyond human hands. PhD candidate at UNA-Bs.As, Argentina.
Lena Séraphin is an artist-writer 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. Lena is currently PI of the artistic research project transitory writing in no one’s land which is supported by the Kone foundation (2024-25). https://lenaseraphin.com and https://writinginpublic.space/
A PhD candidate in Performance Studies, Erika Tsimbrovsky is a choreographic artist who explores multimedia dance installations, the interplay of dance, visual art, and text, and evolving artist-performer-audience relationships. Her current work focuses on choreographic diaries and the concept of a ‘living open diary’ as an artistic and feminist practice.
Litó Walkey (GR/CAN) is a Berlin-based artist whose work operates collaboratively through writing and choreography. Her performance and publishing projects engage collective structures that energize affective circulations of sense and self drifting. She teaches and advises choreographic writing internationally and is currently a PhD candidate in Performance Practices at Gothenburg University. https://litowalkey.org/
Allison Yasukawa is an interdisciplinary maker, liberatory educator, and deep language nerd. She is an Associate Professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and lives in Vancouver, Canada on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples. allisonyasukawa.com and languagingart.design.
Kai Ziegner is a visual artist, author, artistic researcher and lecturer focusing on transformation processes and memory.