Tender Dialogues: Suspending Artistic Research Writing as Meaning-Making
Initiated by Emma Cocker and Lena Séraphin, Tender Dialogues was a 3-hour workshop which took place on 2 July 2022 activated within the frame of the 13th Society of Artistic Research Conference (Mend, Blend, Attend) held at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.
The proposition for the workshop was to critically assess artistic research writing as meaning-making and suggests suspension of end results in favour of collaborative thought processes. The Tender Dialogues workshop is inspired by the writings of Georges Perec and his book An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris that acknowledges overlooked phenomena in a Parisian square in 1974. The aim is to further develop Perec’s writing experiment by collectively making a non-conclusive inventory of public space, rather than referencing the book. The workshop devices observational writing on civic space. It consists of conversations, readings and writings that challenge language as representation. A procedural approach disentangles writing from singular perspectives and suspends writing from meaning making by an epistemic inquiry that advances open-minded dialogue. The writing bridges the corporeal and cerebral and arrives at circumventing isolated objects and thus lacks control of semantic appearances.
In this 180min workshop, we will together test writing in public space beginning with a prompt outlining the role of a sole writer by noting singular words about phenomena in our field of vision. From there we continue to write as a group, a collective that decides on a spatial score for the writers on site, and the observational writing is tested on behalf of bodily perception and sensation. The third prompt continues to be based on bodily awareness, but the writers now move and write simultaneously in a pattern that is collectively decided on. This third writing prompt rejects naming and nouns and is inspired by quantum theory. Each of the three writing sessions is merged with readings and discussions about the experiences of writing and the diverse textual qualities buoyed by a procedural approach. The prompts demonstrate how writing has capacities for forming affinities, how writing can be a collective attempt and therefore attend to reflective collaboration.
More here.