Emma Cocker is a writer-artist whose research focuses on artistic processes and practices, and the performing of thinking-in-action therein. Cocker’s language-based artistic research comprises a matrix of writing, reading and conversation practices, including diverse process-oriented, dialogic-collaborative and aesthetic-poetic approaches to working with and through language. Cocker’s writing has been published in Failure, 2010; Stillness in a Mobile World, 2010; Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought, 2011; Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art, 2012; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013; Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, 2017; The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, 2018; Live Coding: A User's Manual, 2023, and in the solo collections, The Yes of the No, 2016, and How Do You Do?, 2024. Cocker is co-founder of the international Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. She is Associate Professor in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University.

Project/Publication: Lemonade everything was so infinite.

I have been invited by Marit Münzberg  to be involved in a project that takes as its starting point an unfinished sentence by Franz Kafka: Limonade es war alles so grenzenlos. 



Limonade es war alles so grenzenlos. 

(Kafka, Franz, Briefe 1902–1924, Fischer Verlag, p.491)

Limonade es war alles so grenzenlos. was one of Franz Kafka's last sentences published in the Aus den Gesprächsblättern in the publication of his Briefe 1902–1924. Hélène Cixous, who writes a short text on this sentence, translated it as 'Limonade tout était si infini' (which – in the english version of the Hélène Cixous Reader – is further translated as 'Lemonade everything was so infinite'.). Taking the translation 'Lemonade everything was so infinite.' seven titles will be published written by seven different writers/artists – David Berridge, Julia Calver, Emma Cocker, Rachel Lois Clapham, Marit Münzberg, Tamarin Norwood and Mary Paterson.

Each title will explore one of the seven segments of this sentence - 'Lemonade', ' ', 'everything', 'was', 'so', 'infinite', '.'. The titles will be published every three months starting in July/August 2011 with 'Lemonade' by David Berridge. While the first publication is in production Julia Calver will work on the second segment ' ' with the possibility of relating the content to what David Berridge has written/created in the first title etc ...



This form of publishing does not only aim to investigate Cixous's translation of the sentence itself, but also intends to explore the grammatical connection of the different words in the sentence, the possible interconnectivity/collaboration of different voice of the writers/artists, the words in their own grammatically disconnected function and ...

Each invited respondent will work with one of the segments from the unfinished sentence to produce a book/let in dialogue with Münzberg , which will be printed using a risograph process and distributed by LemonMelon publishing. 

More to follow as this project develops.