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

Research Activity: transitory writing in no one's land (Granada)


Between 17 – 26 April, I will be in Granada working alongside collaborators Andrea Coyotzi Borja, Cordula Daus, Paula Urbano, and Lena Séraphin as part of the research project transitory writing in no one’s land. We will be working with PhD researchers from the UNIVERSIDAD DE GRANADA, SPAIN, engaged in collective writing and reading in public space.

The research transitory writing in no one’s land is an inquiry structured as corporeal gatherings, workshops, interweaving situated, performative, embodied and multi-lingual writing as a collective writerly method. What is at stake is the joint action of writing together rather than transference aiming at specific skills or acquisition of knowledge. Embodied writing might give way to a writerly attitude that is receptive to rather than intent on trying to grasp, to somehow penetrate or otherwise know.

 

Writing as a multi-lingual joint performative activity offers the potential for participants to become aware of one’s cultural disposition and tendencies; how one’s senses and sensitivities might have been culturally conditioned. However, we are not interested in writing from our individual identities as given, as if there was already a perspective to be found in advance of the act of writing. We do not write from who we are, but rather from how we are in the very act of writing.