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 project: transitory writing in no one’s land


transitory writing in no one’s land (2024 – 2026) is a collaborative artistic research project that explores how the relational aspects of collective writing and the formation of shared spaces of attention might create conditions for the emergence of inclusive in-between spaces or no one’s lands. This project seeks to improve and diversify artistic research and its corresponding writerly methods by developing, testing and advocating for new practices of research writing that focus on collective, situated, 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 embodied, performative and situated writing practices might open possibilities for not only writing but also for reading as a co-creative and participatory act. This enquiry considers the reciprocal relation between language-based practices and the formation of an inter-subjective potential, attending to the unexpected and unimagined experiences and encounters that might emerge therein.

 

transitory writing in no one’s land sets out to activate temporary communities and inclusive in-between spaces through a series of workshops for testing new practices of situated writing. This interdisciplinary research project is structured as a transnational itinerary involving five diverse sites for learning including schools, multicultural centres and universities: Vantaan Sanataidekoulu or School for Literary Arts, Finland, Universidad de Granada, Spain, Universidad de Monterrey (UDEM), Mexico, Universidad de las Américas Puebla (UDLAP), Mexico and Multicultural Center, Sweden. transitory writing in no one’s land is a collaborative research project conducted by artists, researchers and writers Emma Cocker, Andrea Coyotzi Borja, Cordula Daus, Paula Urbano and Lena Séraphin who each bring specific research interests and experience to the project. The project transitory writing in no one’s land is further supported by an advisory group that includes writer-curator PhD An Paenhuysen and artist-educator PhD Hannah Kaihovirta, and is supported by the Kone foundation. 


See here for more details.