Text: (Un)Doing-Being Together-Apart

Doing Together is a yearly two-day making and sharing practice symposium at Locksbrook Campus, hosted by Bath Spa University’s Centre of Cultural and Creative Industries and Art Research Centre. Workshops, delivered by staff and PGR students from across the University, share practice-based research methods and a broad range of approaches to practice. doing together is proposed as a generous space to make/do/share and discuss practice with colleagues from a range of different Schools. Throughout the symposium, facilitators - alongside participants - test out ways of doing together in an effort to make their practice-based research explicit, rather than simply describe it.

In 2023, I was invited to join Doing Together as a ‘artist ethnographer’ and to share my thoughts & findings from the symposium as part of the plenary session for this event. I have since written '(Un)Doing-Being Together-Apart', an essay that reworks the transcript of the plenary session (with additional references). The text is an attempt to 'remain in fidelity to the texture of the unfolding reflections that were offered during the experiential liveness of the event itself’.

 

The text can be read here.

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.

Research activity: Collaborative Writing in Public Space

Between 11 – 16 April, I will be in Paris with Andrea Coyotzi Borja and Lena Séraphin, undertaking research activities linked to the project, transitory writing in no one’s lands. With a conceptual anchor in Georges Perec’s short book An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (1975/2010), this project 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. It sets out to activate temporary communities and inclusive in-between spaces through a series of workshops for testing new practices of situated writing.

Whilst in Paris, we will engage in three days of writing in Place Saint-Sulpice, echoing the three days of writing in the square that Perec presents in his An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris. On the 15 April 2024, we - Emma, Lena, and Andrea - will be part of a ‘round table event’, hosted by Neli Dobreva (Lecturer in Philosophy of art and Aethetics) to present and discuss the research project transitory writing in no one’s land at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris in co-operation with University of Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne.

The “unfinished becoming” of “transitional writing”

April 15 | Round table organized as part of the “Arts & SHS” program

MONDAY 15 April 2024, 10:00 – 13.00

As part of the Arts & SHS program , in collaboration with the Sorbonne School of Arts, University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

 

The “unfinished becoming” of “transitional writing” or what are the spaces that emerge by writing jointly? The main question posed by the project is: “how can language and writing have an inter-subjective potential? ". This research proposal considers artistic research writing as both an aesthetic and research practice forming an experiential knowledge. Through ephemeral writing and with the ambition to question the space that propagates and expands with joint writing, this project seeks to know how collective writing can open and initiate (new) spaces of engagement. More here.

Symposium: Listen for Beginnings

I have been invited as one of the keynotes for the forthcoming Forum Artistic Research: Listen for Beginnings, (27–29 June 2024) organised and hosted by the Gustav Mahler Private University for Music Klagenfurt and the project Simultaneous Arrivals. More details here.

An abstract for my keynote entitled Soft Letting of Language: Listening for Emergent Wor(l)ds can be found here.

 

Theme: Listen for Beginnings

Listening seems to be a common-place and inconspicuous act, but at closer inspection reveals a complexity of uses, contexts and modalities, offering a rich discourse around which functions of listening in artistic research can be considered. Listening to, with, for others or oneself or an environment. Listening links body, mind, and culture. There is active and passive listening, deep and shallow, reduced and expanded, unconditional and critical, human and machinic. Listening depends and acts back on one’s perspective and orientation, as much as it may cause an intervention in the world. Careful listening requires not just perceptual openness, but an openness for surprise and an engagement to distinguish the subtle tones from louder ones, foreground from background, giving voice to human and non-human entities, to the neglected. Far beyond its prominence in sound art and musicking, in the past half century listening has been instrumental across disciplines, occupying the minds of artists and scholars who wonder about its aesthetical, ethical and epistemic ramifications.

 

“Listen for beginnings”—thus reads the first of thirteen points for improvisation formulated by Pauline Oliveros in her 2012 anthology of text scores. Attention is given to how something is initiated or noted, where beginnings imply that things are in their infancy, still in flux, still forming. In research, beginnings are often moments of wonder when what is being researched is still obtaining its shape. Beginnings can be difficult to make out, or they are clearly foregrounded as in rites of passage. The listening in Oliveros’ instruction does not happen in isolation, it is a collective listening among a group that wants to engage in an activity of togetherness, thus the beginning that is sought is a beginning among, the start of a movement of multiple actors. In this sense, Listen for Beginnings ties in with the question of how forms of collaborative practices arise. Practices based on mutual awareness and giving space to one another, particularly when crossing disciplines and media. Understanding the conditions, methods and potentialities for collaborative space and place making seem crucial to allow the kind of beginnings to happen that make us wonder.

Dialogue - part of The Sense of Common Self

In June 2024, I will be at UniArts, Helsinki as part of the project The Sense of Common Self led by artistic researcher Alex Arteaga (within the wider research framework, How to Live Together in Sound? Toward Sonic Democracy). Along with artist-researcher Kirsi Heimonen, over the last months I have been in conversation with Alex to support the development of an experimental research event that he is currently evolving for exploring ‘dialogue in the dark’. This event will take place at UniArts on the 4 June 2024. More on Arteaga's project The Sense of Common Self here.  More details to follow.

Collaboration: Appearance of the More

In May 2024, I will be in Berlin working with artist Nicole Wendel, as part of our emergent collaboration provisionally titled Appearance of the More. Within this project, we are exploring ways of practising together – or of being-in-touch – for bringing-into-relation the unfolding and embodied processes of drawing and languaging as sensitive fields of perception and cooperation. Specifically, through the meeting of different performative practices, this enquiry attempts to attend to and make tangible the appearance and immanent materiality of an emergent drawing in touch with a moving body, whilst searching for a mode of linguistic articulation capable of operating in fidelity to that experience, to the emerging phenomenon (of drawing).

Image: Documentation from our last live working together in person, Berlin 2023.

Research Article: Dorsal Practices

The article ‘Dorsal Practices—Towards a Back-Oriented Being-in-the-World’ (co-authored by Katrina Brown and Emma Cocker) has been accepted for the forthcoming Special Issue, Tara Page (ed.) ‘With–In Bodies: Research Assemblages of the Sensory and the Embodied’, of the journal Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787).

Link to Special Issue here.

Link to our article,  ‘Dorsal Practices—Towards a Back-Oriented Being-in-the-World’ here. Please do download the PDF version - as the formatting works better than online.

 

About the Special Issue: Bodies and things are not as separate as we were once taught, and their intra-relationship is vital to how we come to know ourselves as humans and how we learn and know our environments—our place-worlds. In 1994, bell hooks conceived of pedagogy as a ‘union of the mind, body and spirit, not just for striving for knowledge in books, but knowledge about how to live in the world’; using this conception, practices and theories of teaching and learning can be understood as an entanglement of the body with the world (social and material), which can be both learnt from and utilized to teach from. So, the body–bodies are complex intra-actions (Barad, 2007) of the social and affective, where embodiment is a process of intra-actions with other bodies—the body–bodies—and these practices of embodiment are the core of our ways of knowing, learning, and being. This Special Issue of Humanities will present research and research processes that are embodied, affective, and relational to explore the complex materialities of bodies. Contributions might explore this topic through a focus on methodology, theoretical framework/s, or political positioning—such as through bodies immersed in social relations of power. This Special Issue aims to examine how we are always with–in bodies, and how research assemblages work the entanglements of bodies with–in matter, bodies with–in theory, bodies with–in practice, bodies with–in research, and bodies with–in other bodies—to develop the new, disrupt the current, and bring together knowledges and understandings of embodiment across disciplines and place-worlds.

 

Image: Katrina Brown and Emma Cocker, Dorsal Practices. Photographic documents/scores generated in S1 Artspace Studios, Sheffield, November 2022. Original video stills by Leon Lockley.

Event: Language-based Artistic Research @ SAR FORUM

With Lena Séraphin, I am co-hosting a half-day session on Language-based Artistic Research as part of the Society for Artistic Research (SAR) FORUM, Tilburg, Netherlands.

 

About the session: 

Language-based Artistic Research is a new term for an emergent field of artistic research, describing approaches to artistic research that specifically work-with language. The Special Interest Group (SIG) for Language-based Artistic Research was inaugurated in 2019 within the frame of the Research Pavilion #3, Venice, and now comprises an international network of over 500 artistic researchers. This SIG explores how artistic research is undertaken in and through different language-based practices. The intent is not to define or fix what language-based artistic research is but rather to reflect how it is practised in its diversity. This session during the SAR FORUM will introduce the activities of this SIG, providing invitation to the wider community of artistic researchers to become involved. This SIG session during the SAR FORUM will include activations of PRACTICE SHARINGS and presentations from THEMATIC NODES through a combination of live/in-person and pre-recorded contributions.

 

See our programme here: 

More about the overall FORUM programme here.

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.

Research Enquiry: Dorsal Practices (in-person)

In early April 2024, I was in Totnes working with Katrina Brown, as part of our ongoing collaboration Dorsal Practices. Specifically, we were working on how we might now evolve our project through different forms of sharing (with others) including live activations of our ‘dorsal practices’ (the three-fold relation of movement-based, conversation and experimental reading practices), as well as developing ideas for future publication. During the week, we were testing out how to bring our various practices into proximity through live activation within a studio space context, which we were also able to pilot with invited guests Rosanna Irvine and Mark Leahy. More about our collaboration Dorsal Practices can be found here.

Research Enquiry: thinking aesthetic thinking

This is an emergent thematic node (within the frame of the SAR SIG Language-based Artistic Research) initiated by Alex Arteaga and Emma Cocker, to inquire into one specific variety of thinking: "aesthetic thinking". Based on previous investigations, this enquiry starts with the hypothesis that aesthetic thinking is enabled through an intensification of sensorimotor and emotional skills and a temporary neutralisation of will-based, target-oriented and logical-constructive actions. Furthermore, we believe that aesthetic thinking unfolds within emerging networks of non-hierarchically distributed agencies and does not produce or consolidate but rather destabilises meaning.

We intend to investigate how language-based artistic research practices may on the one hand trigger, sustain and nurture aesthetic thinking and, on the other hand, enable intuitive evidences of this variety of sense-making to appear. On this basis, we envisage to research as well the relationships between aesthetic thinking and discursive-propositional thinking, a hegemonic modality of meaning-making in the medium of language. We propose to carry on this research on the methodological basis of "ecologies of research practices in action": the mobilisation of connected, intertwined and hybridised practices in the medium of language. The collective activation of practices of reading, transcribing, translating, voicing, writing, distributing, printing, projecting, showing and sharing language in the form of "ecologies" is meant here to realise—meaning simultaneously fulfil and achieve insights—aesthetic thinking.

Research group: withing

Delphine Chapuis Schmitz --- Emma Cocker --- Laressa Dickey --- Sabina Holzer --- Ines Marita Schärer --- Litó Walkey

This is an emergent ‘thematic node’ (within the frame of the SAR SIG for Language-based Artistic Research) for exploring the relation of languaging and bodying: How does languaging affect bodying? How does bodying affect languaging? How does movement inform wording? How does wording inform moving? How can we explore ways for languaging/bodying with, through and from sensing and somatic practices? How to find wording and worlding for the polyphonies of somatic experiences?

 

scores - notations - situations – conditions

 

Initiated through the mutual witnessing of shared resonances and affinities during Convocation II, we conceived this ‘node’ as an emergent framework for experimenting together, for sharing embodied practising, for testing possibilities for a bodily becoming of language/words. Since November 2023, we have been meeting online to explore how we might create shared conditions and situations for practising body/languaging, both through being-with (online) and being-apart (offline). Currently, our shared exploration unfolds through the rhythm of rotation, an evolving constellation of ‘pairings’ and ‘proposals’ based on a bi-monthly cycle. For each bi-monthly iteration, a pairing (two of us working together) devises a score/proposal/invitation/focus which we then all collectively test, enact, activate, reconnecting together after a period of practice (1 month) for sharing materials / findings / discoveries / reflections from the shared research process.  

 

Being in doing.

Being in practice together.

Body/Language.

Between the two, activating the between.

Moving

between different modalities,

shifting from one to the other.

Tilting towards.

Along-siding.

Symposium: Words and Worlds - Languages and Ecologies

In March 2024, I presented a performative paper as part of the symposium Words and Words: Languages and Ecologies, at Royal Holloway, University of London.

 

About the symposium: The Words and Worlds symposium explored the possibilities of language as an intermediary between humans, plants, animals, and other nonhuman beings. The current ecological crisis brings to the fore how humans, among all other forms of life, are entangled within the biosphere, and several theorists help us to understand the role of human writing culture within that entanglement. Donna Haraway sees human and non-human life bound together in a process of sympoiesis, a conception of becoming-with and creating together that encourages us to make ‘kin’ with all manner of living beings. More about the symposium and related exhibition here.

 

My abstract: Ecologies of Reading

Ecologies of Reading is a language-based artistic research practice involving the improvisatory reading/re-reading of conversational transcript material as an emergent mode of linguistic sense-making. In this performative presentation, I explore how this practice/approach has evolved through the following collaborations: (1) Within Reading on Reading (with Cordula Daus and Lena Séraphin) the often-solitary activity of reading becomes transformed into a shared or communal act, as a micro-political or ethico-aesthetic practice through which to re-consider — perhaps even re-organise — the relations between self and other(s), self and world. (2) Dorsal Practices (with Katrina Brown) explores how the tilt or inclination towards dorsal (dis)orientation might enable more connected, sustainable ways of living and aliveness based on the reciprocal, entangled relationship between self/environment. Central to this enquiry is an attempt to explore how different linguistic practices might be developed in fidelity to the embodied experiences of dorsality; how the experiences of listening, languaging, even thinking, might be shaped differently through this embodied tilt of awareness and attention towards the back. (3) Within thinking aesthetic thinking through aesthetic research practices (with Alex Arteaga and Nicole Wendel) we have developed various Ecologies in Action (a meshwork of dynamically interconnected aesthetic research practices including experimental reading), that enable and make available modes of aesthetic communication and resonating coexistence between different human and more-than-human agencies. Within each of these collaborations, an immanent mode of linguistic sense-making emerges through the intersubjective and improvisatory interplay of experimental reading and spoken word, where fresh insights and understanding happens through the unexpected conjunctions, (re)combinations, the circling and looping of language.

Publication: Writing Choreography Textualities of and beyond Dance

In collaboration with Nikolaus Gansterer and Mariella Greil, I have recently published a chapter called ‘Choreo-graphic Writing — Towards More-Than-One Means of Inscription’ in Leena Rouhiainen, Kirsi Heimonen, Rebecca Hilton, Chrysa Parkinson, Writing Choreography Textualities of and beyond Dance, (Routledge, 2024). See more on publication here.

Abstract: Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line is an artistic research project by writer-artist Emma Cocker, artist-performer Nikolaus Gansterer and dancer-choreographer Mariella Greil, for exploring those modes of thinking-feeling-knowing emerging between the lines of choreography, drawing and writing. This research project involved the cultivation of various modes of “choreo-graphic writing” [more-than-one / means of inscription] at the interstice of choreography, drawing and writing, the evolution of experimental language practices as artistic research. Drawing on various “practices” and “figures” developed within Choreo-graphic Figures, Cocker, Gansterer and Greil explore how different performative, sensuous and experimental textual practices and bodily inscriptions emerge as immanent means of articulation for that which remains strictly beyond words: the embodied, relational, affective and material sensitivities and sensibilities of collaborative, co-emergent sense-making taking place in and through the interaction between bodies, between human and non-human agencies.

 

About the publication: A new contribution to studies in choreography, Writing Choreography: Textualities of and beyond Dance focuses upon language and writing-based approaches to choreographing from the perspectives of artists and researchers active in the Nordic and Oceanic contexts. Through the contributions of 15 dance–artists, choreographers, dramaturges, writers, interdisciplinary artists and artist–researchers, the volume highlights diverse textual choreographic processes and outcomes arguing for their relevance to present-day practices of expanded choreography. The anthology introduces some Western trends related to utilizing writing, text and language in choreographic processes. In its focus on art-making processes, it likewise offers insight into how performance can be transcribed into writing, how practices of writing choreograph and how choreography can be a process of writing with. Readers, such as dancers, choreographers, students in higher education of these fields as well as researchers in choreography, gain understanding about different experimental forms of writing forwarded by diverse choreographers and how writing is the motional organisation of images, signs, words and texts. The volume presents a new strand in expanded choreography and acts as inspiration for its continued evolution that engenders new adaptations between language, writing and choreography.