Textorium: Collaborative Writing-Reading with/in Public Space is a collaborative article/exposition by Emma Cocker, Andrea Coyotzi Borja, Cordula Daus, Vidha Saumya, and Lena Séraphin, published in VIS – Nordic Journal for Artistic Research, Issue 10, Circulating Practices (October 2023).
About the article/exposition:
See exposition here.
Textorium: Collaborative Writing-Reading with/in Public Space is a language-based artistic research project that explores collaborative score-based approaches to live, situated writing-reading practices, for attending to experiential aspects of situated embodiment with/in public space. Between 30 May—4 June 2022, five artist-writers (Emma Cocker, Andrea Coyotzi Borja, Cordula Daus, Vidha Saumya and Lena Séraphin) met in Vaasa, Finland, to engage in a process of observational and collective score-based writing-reading with/in public space. With its conceptual anchor in Georges Perec’s short book An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (1975/2010), this enquiry evolves a distinctive approach that foregrounds a corporeal, sensorial and bodily approach to language, where writing and reading are conceived as a collaborative undertaking rather than a solitary endeavour. Working with and through different language-based practices — including performative, poetic, and phenomenology-oriented approaches — the research explores the potentiality of emergent spaces (perhaps even of emergent temporalities, subjectivities and collectivities) produced through the interweaving of shared writing and reading practices, as the cyclical rhythms of writing/reading intermingle with the circulating movements, momentums and flows of public space. Through developing and testing various embodied, corporeal, sensorial, and collaborative approaches, this research enquiry advocates the transformative capacity of language-based artistic research for cultivating new “ecologies of attention” (Yves Citton, 2017). This shared enquiry explores the critical potentiality of our “linguistic bodies” (Di Paolo, Cuffari, and De Jaegher, 2018) as sites of both resistance and affirmation.
About the Issue
See Issue overview here.
VIS issue 10 was published 20 October 2023. The theme is Circulating Practices. This issue presents six expositions, and a recorded conversation, that in their own way are discussing and challenging the circular, as a practice and method, as a model of collaboration, as a theme and as a symbol. Editors are Cecilia Roos and Gunhild Mathea Husvik-Olaussen. Issue number 10 of VIS, Circulating Practices, focus on collaborative artistic constellations that explore temporality and dramaturgy in the exchange of practice and methodology. Collaboration in artistic research often leads to unexpected and process-oriented discoveries. How do we define and situate research collaborations? How do matter, direction and time affectively interact? Who do we identify as the collaborating agents in an artistic research process and how can we discuss authorship/copyright in a co-creative whole? In the editorial work, it has been of interest to look at how the artistic process is reflected in the expositions. Documenting an artistic process can be sensitive and multifaceted. In the context of time-based art, interesting discussions arise regarding the enduring nature of documentation and how it relates to the temporary and processual materiality of the projects. This issue of VIS presents six expositions, and a recorded conversation, that in their own way are discussing and challenging the circular, as a practice and method, as a model of collaboration, as a theme and as a symbol.
