I will be presenting a paper/reading at a forthcoming symposium,
Critical Engagements with Engagement on Friday 26th July, 10am – 4pm at the Bloc gallery, Sheffield.
The symposium will focus on the discussions and debates that surround public
and artistic engagement. Drawing
on my own practice-based involvement in various participatory research projects
(specifically the performance collaborations Open City and Performing the
City), my presentation gathers together prose extracts and photographic
visuals gleaned from my ongoing research enquiry, Performing Communities. Performing
Communities interrogates how participatory performance-based interventions
in the public realm can help support the emergence of critical – and
potentially resistant – models of subjectivity and collectivity, specifically
those forms of ‘temporary invented community’ (Miwon Kwon) created in and
through the act of participation itself. Within
this enquiry I investigate how participatory performance practice might
intervene in and challenge how the public realm is activated and navigated,
through its capacity for producing ‘counter-publics’, new social formations for
rehearsing and testing alternative forms of individual and collective
subjectivity.
- emma cocker
- Emma Cocker is a writer-artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University, UK. Her research enquiry unfolds at the threshold between writing/art, involving diverse process-oriented, dialogic-collaborative and aesthetic-poetic approaches to working with and through language. Cocker often works in collaboration with other artists on durational projects, where the studio-gallery or site-specific context is approached as a live laboratory for shared artistic research. 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?, 2025. Cocker is co-founder of the international Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. See also https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2985-7839