Journal Article: Moves towards the Incomprehensible Wild

My article ‘Moves towards the Incomprehensible Wild’ is going to be published in a forthcoming issue of the online journal Art & Research,  focusing on the theme, Art & Animality.

 Image: Dutton + Swindells


The article explores how for artists, Dutton + Swindells, the notion of ‘encounter’ or ‘event’ emerges as a particular manifestation of wildness. Their practice investigates whether it is possible to every truly encounter (or indeed produce) something wild, something that has not been already captured, classified, tamed. Bringing Dutton + Swindells’ practice into the proximity of Alain Badiou’s conceptualization of the event, my intent is to explore how within their work the event (of an encounter with the wild) promises towards the possibility of the new whilst asking whether such an event could be provoked or produced through a form of critical (artistic) practice.

Moves Towards the Incomprehensible Wild

The article will be published in Art & Animality, Volume 4 No 1 Autumn/Winter 2010

Co-edited by Ron Broglio

Contributors include:

Helen Bullard

Marcus Coates

Emma Cocker

Mark Dion

Susan McHugh and Steve Baker

Carolee Schneeman

Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir & Mark Wilson

Jan Verwoert

Frederick Young

Background 

Art & Research is an artist-led, internationally peer-assessed open access e-journal of Research in Fine Art Practice, focused upon questions, contexts and methodologies of artistic research and practice. Art & Research aims to serve professional artists and academics, curators and critics, artistic researchers, postgraduate and doctoral research students and undergraduates, and to inform current pedagogical thought in a global context. Art & Research welcomes submissions from artists, researchers, academics, critics and curators which seek to engage with all areas of research in Fine Art practice and/or pedagogy. Submissions may take the form of interviews, analytical or polemical essays as well as audio, visual or text-based artworks which seek to address issues in / or are the outcomes of research in Fine Art practice.

Publication: Document

  

Open City have work published in the current issue of the journal Rubric, focusing on the theme, Document. A PDF version of the journal can be found here . 

Project: Urban Retreat

I will be working with artist Sophie Mellor on a new piece of writing, as the basis for a 'Manual of Marginal Places', within the context of her project, Urban Retreat: Routes into Uneasy Landscapes .

 

URBAN RETREAT

13 September - 3 October 2010


Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria

Lottie Child , Emma Cocker, Sophie Mellor , Laura Oldfield Ford, Clare Thornton 

Urban Retreat is a series of artists commissions, activities and events reflecting on the use and value of urban/rural landscapes. It takes Henry David Thoreau's Walden as a starting point, using socialised seclusion and public interaction to investigate the local economic and ecological landscape of Barrow-in-Furness.

Barrow's unusual landscape charts its industrial past and economic decline alongside its reclamation by both nature and current regeneration schemes. The commissioned artists will examine the urban and rural spaces. Their aim, as artists have always done, is to record our enduring relationship with the land - yet they will do this in a variety of ways with a range of materials themed around the urban and rural. 

Sophie Mellor will spend two weeks as an urban wanderer relying on the kindness of strangers and the bounty of the land to house and feed her. Clothed in an especially designed survival jacket by Clare Thornton, she will place herself directly in Barrow's marginalised landscapes, investing in its use and beauty through her interactions with people and place. 

Around this central, durational performance, there will be a series of free public events and activities. Lottie Child will run a Street Training session, investigating how to traverse both industrial and rural Barrow. Lottie has developed Street Training as a method to directly engage people with their surroundings through creative and playful behaviour combining parkour, movement, singing, conversation, games.

 Martin Norris of South Walney Nature Reserve will lead a 'Nature Walk' of Barrow's wastelands, looking at how nature colonises land left fallow by industry.

 Laura Oldfield Ford will take participants on a drawing 'drift' (walk) around Barrow's sites of regeneration, using drawing to reassess and document how industry, politics and economics have impacted the land and its use. 

As well as making the survival jacket for Sophie Mellor's urban wander, Clare Thornton will run a 'Survival Bag' workshop where participants will be invited to make and customise a bag to carry the items they need to negotiate their environment. 

At the end of her urban wander, Sophie Mellor will take audiences on a walk through the different environments she encountered, telling stories of her encounters and offering tastes of the wild and scavenged food she found on the way. 

Barrow-in-Furness Library will be hosting the Urban Retreat Lending Library, where library users can borrow books donated by Urban Retreat artists and invited patrons, for the duration of the project. 

Writer Emma Cocker will be corresponding via post with Sophie Mellor during her urban wander, and the resultant new writing will form the basis of 'Manual for Marginal Places' to be published in Spring 2011.

Event: If....

I will be 'in conversation' with artist Candice Jacobs at G39 in Cardiff on August 10th 2010, in relation to her current show there as part of G39's If.... season. More to follow soon.

Nottingham based Artist Candice Jacobs continues g39's If.... season. Jacobs works with a variety of media producing sound, video, painting and sculpture, with the intention of undermining the traditional role of the artist as retaining control and authorship over their work. Jacobs engages in what could be described as transactional work that involves the exchange of ideas and constructs with social groups or objects that become attached or connected to her through her many roles in daily life.

News: Drawing as a fundamental thinking tool

Relating to a number of projects in which I have been exploring drawing as a fundamental thinking tool or mode of 'productive knowledge - see Hyperdrawing , Drawing the Hypothesis , Oh how drawing thinks itself in me ), I have been invited to be a co-editor for the online journal TRACEY , which is an electronic open access journal dedicated to the presentation of drawing and the discussion of drawing practice.

TRACEY

* introduces a diverse range of material to a fast growing audience of practitioners, educators, students and researchers

* represents many perspectives on drawing including fine art, architectural design, graphics, product design and visualization

* sees drawing as a fundamental thinking tool

* advocates the value of drawing in professional and educational contexts

* provides a focus and forum for all aspects of drawing research

* crosses the boundaries of art, design, science, technology, education and life

* encourages participation and collaboration

Event: ANTI festival

I will be participating in the 'Writing, Language and Site' seminar as part of the 2010 ANTI festival, in Kuopio, Finland. The seminar programme is below. A full programme for the festival can be found here 

Below is a PDF version of the whole programme for this year's ANTI festival 

Publication: Peep/Show: a Taxonomic Exercise in Textual and Visual Seriality

“We suggest a fluid taxonomy. We would rather set things on fire than carve them in stone” –Lynn Behrendt and Anne Gorrick.

The full text (no.1 – 10) produced as part of my collaboration with Open City, has been published as the inaugural text for the 2^nd Issue of Peep/Show: a Taxonomic Exercise in Textual and Visual Seriality , an electronic publishing adventure curated by US based poets/writers Lynn Behrendt and Anne Gorrick. Behrendt and Gorrick had seen the ‘Field Proposals’ I had produced as part of ‘Field Station’ and invited me to submit a text work which worked on the principles of ‘seriality’ or of an ‘unfolding’. I was struck by a particular statement made by the curators of this project (above) as well as the idea of a publication dedicated to an 'unfolding'.

About THE CARNIVAL, PEEP/SHOW ISSUE #2

“Our second issue of Peep/Show is built around the sense that anything can happen when you put a lion-tamer and a human cannonball in the same room. It's about possibility, about disease we've never seen before, a viral opening, traveling on a train to the next town, reinvention, a deliberate reincarnation, the unfounded assumption that everything isn't already written, and the show that emerges from that dystopic assumption.”

Peepifesto

PEEP/SHOW is an electronic poetry publication of previously unpublished work by contemporary innovative writers. A new taxonomic category is presented every five months or so, and unfolds over the course of time, with a large chunk of serially-minded work by a different poet added every few weeks.

Possible uses and manipulation of constrained space

Just whose guided gaze?

fixed vantage point / hiding behind vs. exposing / reading vs. looking

a forbidden secret: a poem

Thomas Weynants, "Early Visual Media"

Through a hole into a vast scene, a panorama in a box

Anne Pundyk, "Unconsciousness Raising" at Brooklyn Rail, Sept 09

Stereoscope, viewmaster, camera obscura

Paul Thomas, "Reconsideration of Space"

serial unfolding

unspooling

undone

Taxonomy Vocabulary

John Kelsey on Rodarte

........to be continued as it occurs

Projects: drawing … walking … failing

I have recently been invited to participate in a number of proposed AHRC projects which in diverse ways extend some of the concerns emerging in my current research practice specifically in relation to failure, drawing and walking. These projects include the proposed research network bid 'The Art of Failure' (Laura Cull and Cormac Power); 'Oh how drawing thinks itself in me' (Helena Goldwater, Lucia King, Hester Reeve, Pak Keung Wan) and 'Walking Women' (Dee Hedden and Cathy Turner). More to follow as/when these projects develop.

Essay/text: Inbindable Volume

I have been invited to produce a text for a publication in conjunction with Inbindable Volume, an ambitious new multi-screen video installation by Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry. I am specifically interested in the term 'inbindable', and hope the text may provide a space to explore strategies - of elasticity, porosity, mobility, fragmentation, dispersal (even wildness) - whereby a set of ideas might evade or elude capture or containment. 

Information about Inbindable Volume

Inbindable Volume is a multi-screen video installation dealing with the journey between the conception of an idea, its materialisation and eventual decomposition/decommission, using architecture and books as its central motifs. The multiple screens journey through the Brutalist space of an empty library interior that unfolds in an assemblage of tracking shots. The concrete physicality of the architecture is sensuously rendered against the unseen imagined spaces alluded to within the books held in the space; drawing a parallel, perhaps, to Jorge Luis Borges' short story The Library of Babel in which the author imagines an infinite number of hexagonal libraries containing books with every possible ordering of letters, spaces, and punctuation marks.

The rhythm and texture of the film is driven by the voice of an omnipresent narrator, who describes the lifespan of a building from conception to abandonment - through a text that skips unsettlingly between past, present and future tense. The elements of the work conspire to generate multiple perspectives in time and space creating a state of flux between continual movement, and a sense of security engendered by the narrator's formal and reassuring tone.

Filmed in Birmingham's iconic Central Library, the city's most infamous example of Brutalist architecture, Inbindable Volume is an exploration of the journey between conception and materialization - both in architecture and books - and what becomes of ideologies after they have been realised in material form.

Launching VIVID's 2010/11 artists commissioning programme, the work has been developed during a three month residency at VIVID's project space in Eastside with the support of The Henry Moore Foundation, Birmingham City of Culture, and the Jan van Eyck Academie, an institute for research and production in the fields of fine art, design and theory in the Netherlands.

The exhibition opens at VIVID on 29 July and continues to 21 August 2010. The exhibition tours to Citric Gallery, Italy in March 2011.

karin kihlberg & reuben henry artists' statement

"Our work is embedded in society's contemporary habit of viewing the world through second-hand information; both in terms of current events, culture and history. How do these documents take form in our minds and what form would they take as an object, text or in a performance? How do documents become part of our own memories and how do they shape our perception of the world we live in?

Documentation, representation, and the narratives that bind history together are utilised by contemporary culture as routes to comprehend and consume the contemporary paradigm. In our work we take these same routes as phenomena to be explored, appropriated, transformed and confused in combination with established structures of drama and fictionalization.

We aim to capture uncertainties of the present and generate an unstable perception of time. We use subjective understandings and non-linear narrative as a method to see an event from alternative angles and perspectives. We are not bound to any particular medium, but are drawn instead to finding ways in which documentation can operate beyond representing the past."

Publication: ‘People, Places, Process: The Shops Project’

My essay 'Social Assemblage' on the work of FrenchMottershead has been published in the book ‘People, Places, Process: The Shops Project’ which will be officially launched on Monday 21 June 2010 in London.

‘People, Places, Process: The Shops Project’

A presentation and book launch by FrenchMottershead

Hosted by British author, historian and curator, Dr Mike Phillips OBE.

British artists FrenchMottershead (Rebecca French and Andrew Mottershead) create art that explores ideas of identity, social ritual and the everyday public and private realms in which they are played out. One of their recent projects is ‘Shops’, an international project uncovering communities formed around independent, local traders. FrenchMottershead’s exploration of the connections between local traders and residents took them, among other places, to the city of Iasi, in north-eastern Romania. Here they engaged with shop-owners, staff and customers, documenting the encounters and also the stories of the people they have met. The Romanian part of ‘The Shops Project’ was supported by the Ratiu Foundation.

In collaboration with Site Gallery Sheffield, the major hub of contemporary art in Yorkshire, this Culture Power event will see FrenchMottershead present their project, with an emphasis on Iasi. With this occasion, the artists will also present the book resulting from their encounters, part of the ‘Shops’ project, around the world.

Book Launch: ‘People, Places, Process: The Shops Project’
by Rebecca French and Andrew Mottershead. Site Gallery, 2010. ISBN: 978-1-899926-08-4
The book can be purchased on the evening at the special price of £9.95 (RRP £12.00).

‘People, Places, Process: The Shops Project’ was published to accompany FrenchMottershead’s ‘The Shops Project’ exhibition at Site Gallery, Sheffield, which took place from November 2009 to February 2010.

The residencies and work periods that resulted in work represented in the exhibition and this book took place in Bahia, Brazil (January 2008); Sao Paulo, Brazil (February - March 2008); Guangzhou, China (April - May 2008); Iasi, Romania (November - December 2008); Ljubljana, Slovenia (March - April 2009); Istanbul, Turkey (June - July 2009); and Sheffield, England (August - November 2009).

This publication compiles four years of research, documentation and artworks that have resulted from FrenchMottershead’s international Shops project, which looks at society through the lens of local shops.
Texts by the artists and local writers from the cities they've visited sit alongside contributions from Peter Jackson, Professor of Human Geography at The University of Sheffield, writer and lecturer Emma Cocker, and artist and writer Tim Etchells. Together they show, describe and analyse unique customers' and shop owners' stories in a range of different shopping landscapes, emphasising their differences but also revealing their connections and common grounds.

Private View of ‘The Shops Project’ in London
A part of ‘The Shops Project’ will be on display at the Ratiu Foundation / Romanian Cultural Centre, from 21 to 30 June 2010. 

Writing/Text: Experiments along the brink of I

"The challenge then, is to figure out a way beyond and through the impossibility of community. This is not to invoke a transcendent plateau from which one will find a new synthetic resolution free of contradictions. Quite the contrary, it is meant to suggest the impossibility of total consolidation, wholeness and unity [...] and perhaps more importantly, to suggest that such an impossibility is a welcome premise upon which a collective artistic praxis, as opposed to a 'community based art' might be theorised', Miwon Kwon, p.154.

"Research should no longer be done off to one side, in a school, a library, a laboratory. Where one lives needs to become a laboratory for researching, for mapping directly, the living body itself, oneself as world-forming inhabitant ... there needs to be a communal devising, selecting and combining of techniques that will strengthen organisms-persons and help them to regenerate themselves; results need to be pooled and compared" Architectural Body, Madeline Gins + Arakawa, pxx

Whilst at the PSi Performing Publics conference in Toronto I was invited to observe the following workshop, with the view to producing a new piece of writing in response for a forthcoming publication. The workshop was led by artists Sara Wookey and Bianca Sclair Mancini and explored the city through various forms of choreographic intervention. Wookey and Sclair Mancini's collaborative practice resonates with many of the concerns that have been developing within my wider practice, especially in relation to my own collaboration with the investigative art project, Open City.

I am tentatively developing a text in response to this work entitled, Experiments Along the Brink of I, where I envisage exploring a number of tactics wherein the distinction between self and other (and indeed world) becomes blurred or folded -  the practices of gleaning gestures, witnessing/attendance, following, flocking, copying, creating synchronicity in rhythm, becoming architectural.

Documentation of 'Movement and the City' workshop

Essay/Publication: Distancing the if and then

Below is a commissioned text for the forthcoming publication 'Drawing a Hypothesis - Figures of Research', (ed.) Nikolaus Gansterer, (Jan Van Eyck Academy and Verlag Springer ). The publication will include contributions from Hanneke Grootenboer (an art historian of the early modern period) and Andreas Schinner (a cryptologist/physicist).


More on the publication to follow soon. 



The text was prompted by a series of 'figures' sent by the artist Nikolaus Gansterer as the provocation towards thinking. The 'figures' included:

Nikolaus Gansterer says of the project 'Drawing an Hypothesis is a publication project dealing with the relationship between science and fiction by reflecting methods of description and interpreta-

tion. My drawings serve as a visual starting point for a dialogue about ideas on ideas. The idea is a central category in philosophy and can also be considered as the driving force behind any creative process. Often this pivotal moment when coming up with an idea is mystifyed especially within arts and science. I am interested delving more into the history of ideas, their critical and visionary potential paired with dubious outgrowths. By inviting different persons from various backgrounds and professional skills (artists/scientists/writers) to participate in the project I am building up a collection  of reading and interpreting images. I am sending out a series of drawings to the participants asking for a micrology (= short explanation/text/speculation) about what they see/read in the graphic display. According to the interpretations I am creating a new series of images to circumstantiate or even negate the supposed theory. By re-returning them to the same interpretor reasking for a new micrology a chain reaction is started. This process of actually “Drawing an Hypothesis” continues as long there is an action potential between me and the interpretators'.

Text work: new Open City texts

I am currently working with Open City (Andrew Brown and Katie Doubleday) to develop new work to take to Toronto as part of the forthcoming PSi Performing Publics events in June, and also for new festival contexts for the UK in the Autumn. Here are 2 new postcard texts (No.9 and No.10), which will complete the series of cards made in collaboration with Open City (2007 - 2010). We are currently working on a limited edition foldable pamphlet which will be designed by Joff+Ollie, for bringing all ten texts together for the first time, alongside a series of instruction and visual propositions. If you would like a copy of this publication please email emma.cocker@ntu.ac.uk.

Event: Life - A Users Manual

I will be chairing this event (below) as part of Art Sheffield 2010 Life: A Users Manual . I hope that this event will provide a space to further tease out ideas which have been emerging in some of my recent writing including Performing Stillness and Performing Collectivity, around the affective experience of collectivity and community (particularly through the prism of Spinoza's Ethics).

In Conversation Event

Saturday 24 April 2pm

Showroom Cinema

Frederique Bergholtz will discuss some of the issues raised by Art Sheffield 2010 ­ Life: A Users Manual. Frederique Bergholtz is a co-curator of Art Sheffield 2010 and director of the rolling platform If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution.  

She will be in conversation with participating artist (and lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University) Becky Shaw, following which there will be opportunity for discussion, facilitated by Emma Cocker (Writer and Senior Lecturer, Nottingham Trent University)

Context

The title of Art Sheffield 2010 – Life: A User’s Manual, refers to Georges Perec’s 1978 novel in which he builds up a detailed picture of the inhabitants of a single apartment block by describing the spaces in which they live, the objects in their rooms, the photos and paintings on the walls. There is something to this concentration on detail and the relationship between the individual and the collective that seems timely to explore when we feel as never before, especially with the current crisis, the effects of economic and social pressures on our everyday actions. Attempting to grapple with such global changes and not be overwhelmed by them, venturing to ask ‘where am I in this?’ is where art and the encounters it creates can be most powerful.

A key concern is to explore the notion of ‘affect’. Often used interchangeably with the experience of feeling or emotion, it is essentially an ability to affect others and in turn to be affected by them. Art Sheffield 2010 - Life: A User’s Manual proposes that unspectacular acts of everyday ‘affect’ might be a way to chart a path through current circumstances. Affect, not understood in the romantic sense as the catharsis often promised by art, but as the potential for embodied interpersonal experience which may suggest the next possible step within the bigger picture.

Publication: Failure

Failure (ed) Lisa Le Feuvre Amid the global uncertainties of our times, failure has become a central subject of investigation in recent art. Celebrating failed promises and myths of the avant-garde, or setting out to realize seemingly impossible tasks, artists have actively claimed the space of failure to propose a resistant view of the world. Here success is deemed overrated, doubt embraced, experimentation encouraged, and risk considered a viable strategy. The abstract possibilities opened up by failure are further reinforced by the problems of physically realizing artworks—wrestling with ideas, representation, and object-making. By amplifying both theoretical and practical failure, artists have sought new, unexpected ways of opening up endgame situations, ranging from the ideological shadow of the white cube to unfulfilled promises of political emancipation. Between the two subjective poles of success and failure lies a space of potentially productive operations where paradox rules and dogma is refused. This collection of writings, statements, mediations, fictions, polemics, and discussions identifies failure as a core concern in cultural production. Failure identifies moments of thought that have eschewed consensus, choosing to address questions rather than answers. Artists surveyed include: Bas Jan Ader, Francis Alÿs, John Baldessari, Chris Burden, Phil Collins, Martin Creed, David Critchley, Fischli & Weiss, Ceal Floyer, Isa Genzken, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Félix González-Torres, Wade Guyton, International Necronautical Society, Ray Johnson, Mike Kelley, Martin Kippenberger, Michael Krebber, Bruce Nauman, Simon Patterson, Janette Parris, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Dieter Roth, Allen Ruppersberg, Roman Signer, Annika Ström, Paul Thek, William Wegman Writers include: Giorgio Agamben, Samuel Beckett, Daniel Birnbaum, Bazon Brock, Johanna Burton, Emma Cocker, Gilles Deleuze, Russell Ferguson, Ann Goldstein, Jörg Heiser, Jennifer Higgie, Richard Hylton, Jean-Yves Jouannais, Lisa Lee, Stuart Morgan, Hans-Joachim Müller, Karl Popper, Edgar Schmitz, Coosje van Bruggen Documents of Contemporary Art series Copublished with Whitechapel Gallery, London

Text works: Field Proposals

     Emma Cocker, Field Proposals


New text works developed from the recent Art Writing Field Station curated by David Berridge. The work proposes the idea of a portable studio, or rather asks what might be the basis of an art-writing studio made mobile.

Writing: ANTI festival

I have provisionally been invited to write a critical response to the forthcoming ANTI festival which will be taking place in Finland from September 29 - 3 October. More to follow soon.

ANTI Festival 2010 will focus on textual, written and language-based responses to site specificity. We encourage artists working across a range of media to consider the following areas of enquiry, these include, but are not limited to:

• Page and screen-based responses to site - contextual approaches to publication and dissemination
• Mapping and mark-making - geographic and topographic textual processes
• Inscription - the materiality of writing
• Language and translation – nationhood and place
• Writing as performance - live writing as contextual and site-based practice
• Performance texts and site-based processes – spatial/contextual engagement and live utterance

ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival will be held in Kuopio, Finland between Sept 29th – Oct 3rd 2010.
ANTI is an international contemporary arts festival presenting site-specific works made for public space. Over the past eight years ANTI has presented live, sonic, visual and text-based art from today’s most exciting and innovative artists. A truly international festival and Finland’s foremost presenter of Live Art, ANTI is a meeting place for artists and audiences fascinated by how art shapes and responds to the places and spaces of everyday life.

ANTI’s emphasis is on site-specificity. The festival understands this term in an expanded sense; proposals may suggest works that deal with a site geographically, culturally or by association etc.

CRITIC as INTER

INTER is a contingent state of being between, among, in the midst of, within a group. It signals towards mutuality and collectivity; towards existing together, experiences produced during or with. It is also the act of being put to ground, the condition of a body buried. ‘Burying oneself’ alternatively describes the state of being immersed in a particular task, situation or site. INTER troubles the surface, working from the interior, on the inside. INTER describes the state of criticism where I propose to operate interstitially–as interlocutor, interviewer, interrogator, intermediary–to generate a critical response in the form of fieldwork/art-writing exploring the interactions and interrelationships produced at/through/within ANTIfestival.

I am interested in the art-work as site; of art-writing as a necessarily site-specific practice with a particular temporal and spatial relation to the context in which it is produced. As an art-writer my practice is often generated at the site of another’s production. The encounter with a site (the space-time of a festival/exhibition, the practice of another) operates as a catalyst for activating a thinking process, within which certain extant ideas and interests become interrogated, brought to the fore. It is through the encounter with another (site/work/thought/word/body) that a particular trajectory of thinking (and of writing) becomes set in motion; that ideas are activated or awoken. Writing is the residue or remainder of a relational exchange, the product of a meeting point between self and other, myself and the world. Rather than an act of criticism that only takes place after the event (from a position of authority, always located elsewhere), I am interested in what it means to write from/within/at the site of practice. Here, the site/context of practice not only refers to the site of the artwork itself, but the apprehension of and engagement with those rather more interstitial spaces of (art) production and reception – the unspoken interval between an artist’s intentions and resultant work, the interaction between art and site, art and audience, one work and another.

My writing practice is not one of reportage or critique but rather an attempt to locate myself in and write out of the space of art practice. One practice becomes grafted into the territory of another in order to generate a new form of production emerging at the suture where the two practices meet. My work is often forced by the germinal conditions provided by external forces or pressures; it attempts to access the logic of another’s practice whilst developing new ideas through a parallel or tangential line of enquiry. Mine is not an attempt to speak on behalf of another, but to write alongside, operate dialogically.

What might it then mean to produce a critical text that is site-specific to ANTIfestival – to explore what might here constitute site? Working on-site at the festival I will generate textual fieldwork/raw material (writing/mapping/diagramming/recording from observations, interviews, encounters and interactions within ANTIfestival) that will inform and form a new piece of writing that explores and performs the specific terms of site-specificity provoked/produced through the festival. 

Event: Wandering and Waiting

I will be delivering a research seminar in April, which I hope to use as a space to tease out (and talk through) some of the questions and issues that have emerged in recent work. In this seminar I propose to explore the connections and tensions between research and practice within my own work, in order to open up a discussion about the symbiotic and complex relationship between these different modes of working and thinking. The intent is use the concrete example provided by a series of recent projects (2009-10) as a context against which to provoke a conversation around ideas of method, knowledge and the dilemmas faced by the artist-researcher.  Work referred to will include my ongoing collaboration with the project Open City, and a series of art-writing projects including a recent writing residency as part of The Summer of Dissent, at Plan 9 in Bristol. The seminar will also be marked by an informal launch of RITE, a publication bringing together the work of 19 art writers that enact expanded acts of criticism, question the essay form, use language as material and attempt to work the different ways that writing can be on or about new work.

Exhibition: Essaying Essays at The Reading Room, Berlin

David Berridge’s ESSAYING ESSAYS: AN ASSEMBLING (which includes my text work 'To try, a Tentative Attempt') has been selected to be part of THE READING ROOM  project in Berlin, curated by Dominique Hurth and Ciarán Walsh 

 Emma Cocker, to try, a tentative attempt, 2010. Limited edition textwork.

Berridge’s proposal for THE READING ROOM explores how the form of the ESSAYING ESSAYS: AN ASSEMBLING publication occupied an overlapping space between print and online, magazine, exhibition and essay. For THE READING ROOM Berridge will be submitting the magazine as an unbound folio.

The Reading Room is based on former institutional “Reading Rooms” (such as the one of the British Museum in London), and functions as such: it will be open for public viewing, with those wanting to use it being required to make an appointment and also register beforehand their particular interested in the publications or project. The Reading Room takes its initial presentation location from the idea of the “Salon”, gathering its printed matters under the roof of an inspiring hostess or host. The visitors and readers of the Reading Room will ring the bell of a private apartment, climb up the stairs to it, and then be able to sit in a study room. Refreshments will be served. 

The organisers of The Reading Room will maintain a curated monthly selection of approximately 25 publications that can be seen at one time. Those will be chosen based on changing criteria, such as topics, size, colour, content, and links to each other. A monthly index will be published online. By special agreement, the remaining publications of the archive can of course be read and viewed, next to the monthly selection.

The Reading Room  is a project conceived and organised by Dominique Hurth and Ciarán Walsh.