Aesthetic, Poetic, Performative: Artistic Thinking and Practices of Writing
The aim of this Research Pavilion event is to explore and discuss recent developments in art writing, language-based artistic research, and literary artistic research.
Two-day event on writing in artistic research
This two-day event introduces, through practice and conceptualisation, a variety of artistic and scholarly practices of writing forwarded in the field of artistic research. Focusing on the opportunities that somatic, performative, collaborative, and site-specific approaches to writing can offer diverse understandings of our embeddedness in present environments and political imaginaries and futures thinking. The overall aim of the event is to explore and discuss recent developments in art writing, language-based artistic research, and literary artistic research.
Programme
- December 4 and 5 at 10 – 17.15 in Majakka-space and the White Studio (Mylly)
This two-day event introduces, through practice and conceptualisation, a variety of artistic and scholarly practices of writing forwarded in the fields of artistic research and artist pedagogy. Focusing on the opportunities that somatic, performative, collaborative, and site-specific approaches to writing can offer diverse understandings of our embeddedness in present environments and political imaginaries and futures thinking. The overall aim of the event is to explore and discuss recent developments in art writing, language-based artistic research, literary artistic research, as well as related pedagogic practices.
The event comprises of four workshops and two panels. The workshops host a limited number of participants and require registration. The registration will be open through November 10 – 28. Please register through this link.
Thursday, December 4
10 – 12.00 Alex Arteaga and Leena Rouhiainen: Somatic and collaborative writing as artistic research practice
- White Studio with a maximum of 16 participants
This workshop explores the body(self)-environment(world) embeddedness through specific practices of somatic-aesthetic attention as a substrate for forms of reflective notation—“somatic writing”—from a phenomenological and enactivist perspective.
The fundamental hypothesis is that practices that intensify the performance of sensorimotor and emotional bodily skills and modes of attentive awareness allow for sensing the dimensions of the processes of embodiment, meaning simultaneously sensing, feeling, and making-sense. These intertwined dimensions refer to the co-emergence of selves and worlds out of the interaction of bodies and environments. On this basis, specific practices of somatic and collective writing enable the reflection of these processes through forms of spontaneous notation.
This experimental workshop draws from two research trajectories that developed different practices of writing: “textual choreography” (Heimonen/Rouhiainen) and “exploratory essay-writing” (Arteaga).
The workshop will incorporate three components: a conceptual reflection on the practices and their theoretical frameworks, the performance of practices of sensing, and the performance of practice of writing.
13 – 16.00 Katrina Brown and Emma Cocker: Dorsal Practices – Soft Letting of Language
- White Studio with a maximum of 15 participants
Dorsal Practices is a collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer-artist Emma Cocker, for exploring how the cultivation of a back-oriented awareness (a dorsal inclination) might shape our embodied, affective, and relational being-in-the-world, nurturing more connected, sustainable ways of living and of aliveness. Rather than a mode of passive withdrawal, of turning one’s back, Dorsal Practices explores how aback-leaning orientation might support a more open, receptive ethics of relation. Engaging with, through, and from the back invites the deprivileging of certain habits of uprightness and frontality — the head-oriented, sight-oriented, forward-facing, future-leaning tendencies of a culture intent on grasping a sense of the world through naming and control.
Since 2021, Dorsal Practices has unfolded through experimental, embodied research combining various movement-based and language-based practices. In this workshop session, Brown and Cocker open up and share their collaborative research process with attendees, drawing on the dialogue between the two researchers’ experiences as a choreographer and as a writer-artist, by combining body-based, somatic-informed exercises with language-based artistic research approaches. Weaving between the sharing of an emergent vocabulary and practice-based exploration through various movement-based and language-based ‘scores’ or exercises this session engages with the questions: What forms of writing/language can be developed in fidelity to the embodied experiences of dorsality? How are the experiences of moving, listening, voicing, writing shaped differently through a tilt of awareness and attention towards the back? What vocabularies might emerge through a shift of attention away from frontality, verticality, even visuality towards increased awareness of dorsality, diagonality, and listening?
16.15 – 17.15 Panel of the Day
Workshop facilitators and participants reflect on the contributions of the day with a focus on the somatic or embodied and collaborative features of language-based artistic research
Friday, December 5
10 – 13.00 Maria Fusco: No Feeling is Final
- Majakka with a maximum of 10 participants
“Anxiety nevertheless emerges… as a general effect of spatialization involving thrown, hurled, or forcibly displaced objects.” Ugly Feelings by Sianne Ngai
“Performance has always been at the heart of my work. I went to Milton, N.Y. in 1975 to acquire the first six pages of what you are reading. Cause the poem was real and the job was not.” Inferno by Eileen Myles
This is three-hour workshop is limited to ten participants. Utilising feelings which traditionally have negative or embarrassing connotations, such as anxiety or envy, this practical writing workshop will draw on participants’ lived experiences to examine, embody and write future feelings. The workshop will focus on a carefully guided system of writing exercises to address the complexities and confluences of the public and the personal in an academic context to create hybrid art-critical-lyrical writing integrating the autotextual with other explicitly subjective modes of expression.
14.00 – 16.00 Aino-Kaisa Koistinen and Pilvi Porkola: Artistic Thinking and Writing with Futures and Imaginaries
- Majakka with a maximum of 15 participants
How are futures created now, through imaginations grounder in the present?
What kinds of writing practices can be used to evoke such imaginations?
Our time of several intertwined crises, also called the multi-crisis, is constantly producing new social and ecological problems. The solutions to these require the ability for political imagination and futures thinking. Yet, futures thinking needs to be grounded in the present, as the future is made by our present actions. Art plays a central role in the emergence and development of new ways of thinking, knowing, and doing, and thereby in strengthening futures thinking.
In this workshop, we invite participants to develop with us the concept and practice of imagination as a form of feminist, situated knowledge-production, as well as artistic practice and pedagogy expressed through writing. We are specifically interested in collective, dialogical and performative ways of writing.
The workshop includes exercises that prompt participants to imagine the future and act differently, based on their embodied and situated experiences in the present moment. The workshop is aimed at anyone interested in artistic thinking and writing as manifested through literature or other kinds of textual formats and performances, including artists, artist-pedagogues, researchers, and students.
16.15 – 17.15 Panel of the Day
Workshop facilitators and participants reflect on the contributions of the day with a focus on the affective, performative, and imaginative features of art writing, writing as artistic research, and artist pedagogy.
Presenters and facilitators
- Writer-Artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art Emma Cocker (Nottingham Trent University)
- Writer and Professor of Interdisciplinary Writing Maria Fusco (University of Dundee)
- Choreographer and Senior Lecturer in Dance & Choreography Katrina Brown (Falmouth University)
Presenters and facilitators from Uniarts Helsinki
- Artist-Researcher and University Researcher Alex Arteaga
- Poet and University Researcher Aino-Kaisa Koistinen
- Performance Artist and University Researcher Pilvi Porkola
- Dance Artist and Professor of Artistic Research Leena Rouhiainen
Contact information
-
Leena Rouhiainen
- Johtaja, Tutkimusinstituutti, Tutkimus ja tohtorikoulutus
Professori, Teatterikorkeakoulu, Teatterikorkeakoulu - +358400792093
- leena.rouhiainen@uniarts.fi
Two-day event on writing in artistic research
This two-day event introduces, through practice and conceptualisation, a variety of artistic and scholarly practices of writing forwarded in the field of artistic research. Focusing on the opportunities that somatic, performative, collaborative, and site-specific approaches to writing can offer diverse understandings of our embeddedness in present environments and political imaginaries and futures thinking. The overall aim of the event is to explore and discuss recent developments in art writing, language-based artistic research, and literary artistic research.
Programme
- December 4 and 5 at 10 – 17.15 in Majakka-space and the White Studio (Mylly)
This two-day event introduces, through practice and conceptualisation, a variety of artistic and scholarly practices of writing forwarded in the fields of artistic research and artist pedagogy. Focusing on the opportunities that somatic, performative, collaborative, and site-specific approaches to writing can offer diverse understandings of our embeddedness in present environments and political imaginaries and futures thinking. The overall aim of the event is to explore and discuss recent developments in art writing, language-based artistic research, literary artistic research, as well as related pedagogic practices.
The event comprises of four workshops and two panels. The workshops host a limited number of participants and require registration. The registration will be open through November 10 – 28. Please register through this link.
Thursday, December 4
10 – 12.00 Alex Arteaga and Leena Rouhiainen: Somatic and collaborative writing as artistic research practice
- White Studio with a maximum of 16 participants
This workshop explores the body(self)-environment(world) embeddedness through specific practices of somatic-aesthetic attention as a substrate for forms of reflective notation—“somatic writing”—from a phenomenological and enactivist perspective.
The fundamental hypothesis is that practices that intensify the performance of sensorimotor and emotional bodily skills and modes of attentive awareness allow for sensing the dimensions of the processes of embodiment, meaning simultaneously sensing, feeling, and making-sense. These intertwined dimensions refer to the co-emergence of selves and worlds out of the interaction of bodies and environments. On this basis, specific practices of somatic and collective writing enable the reflection of these processes through forms of spontaneous notation.
This experimental workshop draws from two research trajectories that developed different practices of writing: “textual choreography” (Heimonen/Rouhiainen) and “exploratory essay-writing” (Arteaga).
The workshop will incorporate three components: a conceptual reflection on the practices and their theoretical frameworks, the performance of practices of sensing, and the performance of practice of writing.
13 – 16.00 Katrina Brown and Emma Cocker: Dorsal Practices – Soft Letting of Language
- White Studio with a maximum of 15 participants
Dorsal Practices is a collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer-artist Emma Cocker, for exploring how the cultivation of a back-oriented awareness (a dorsal inclination) might shape our embodied, affective, and relational being-in-the-world, nurturing more connected, sustainable ways of living and of aliveness. Rather than a mode of passive withdrawal, of turning one’s back, Dorsal Practices explores how aback-leaning orientation might support a more open, receptive ethics of relation. Engaging with, through, and from the back invites the deprivileging of certain habits of uprightness and frontality — the head-oriented, sight-oriented, forward-facing, future-leaning tendencies of a culture intent on grasping a sense of the world through naming and control.
Since 2021, Dorsal Practices has unfolded through experimental, embodied research combining various movement-based and language-based practices. In this workshop session, Brown and Cocker open up and share their collaborative research process with attendees, drawing on the dialogue between the two researchers’ experiences as a choreographer and as a writer-artist, by combining body-based, somatic-informed exercises with language-based artistic research approaches. Weaving between the sharing of an emergent vocabulary and practice-based exploration through various movement-based and language-based ‘scores’ or exercises this session engages with the questions: What forms of writing/language can be developed in fidelity to the embodied experiences of dorsality? How are the experiences of moving, listening, voicing, writing shaped differently through a tilt of awareness and attention towards the back? What vocabularies might emerge through a shift of attention away from frontality, verticality, even visuality towards increased awareness of dorsality, diagonality, and listening?
16.15 – 17.15 Panel of the Day
Workshop facilitators and participants reflect on the contributions of the day with a focus on the somatic or embodied and collaborative features of language-based artistic research
Friday, December 5
10 – 13.00 Maria Fusco: No Feeling is Final
- Majakka with a maximum of 10 participants
“Anxiety nevertheless emerges… as a general effect of spatialization involving thrown, hurled, or forcibly displaced objects.” Ugly Feelings by Sianne Ngai
“Performance has always been at the heart of my work. I went to Milton, N.Y. in 1975 to acquire the first six pages of what you are reading. Cause the poem was real and the job was not.” Inferno by Eileen Myles
This is three-hour workshop is limited to ten participants. Utilising feelings which traditionally have negative or embarrassing connotations, such as anxiety or envy, this practical writing workshop will draw on participants’ lived experiences to examine, embody and write future feelings. The workshop will focus on a carefully guided system of writing exercises to address the complexities and confluences of the public and the personal in an academic context to create hybrid art-critical-lyrical writing integrating the autotextual with other explicitly subjective modes of expression.
14.00 – 16.00 Aino-Kaisa Koistinen and Pilvi Porkola: Artistic Thinking and Writing with Futures and Imaginaries
- Majakka with a maximum of 15 participants
How are futures created now, through imaginations grounder in the present?
What kinds of writing practices can be used to evoke such imaginations?
Our time of several intertwined crises, also called the multi-crisis, is constantly producing new social and ecological problems. The solutions to these require the ability for political imagination and futures thinking. Yet, futures thinking needs to be grounded in the present, as the future is made by our present actions. Art plays a central role in the emergence and development of new ways of thinking, knowing, and doing, and thereby in strengthening futures thinking.
In this workshop, we invite participants to develop with us the concept and practice of imagination as a form of feminist, situated knowledge-production, as well as artistic practice and pedagogy expressed through writing. We are specifically interested in collective, dialogical and performative ways of writing.
The workshop includes exercises that prompt participants to imagine the future and act differently, based on their embodied and situated experiences in the present moment. The workshop is aimed at anyone interested in artistic thinking and writing as manifested through literature or other kinds of textual formats and performances, including artists, artist-pedagogues, researchers, and students.
16.15 – 17.15 Panel of the Day
Workshop facilitators and participants reflect on the contributions of the day with a focus on the affective, performative, and imaginative features of art writing, writing as artistic research, and artist pedagogy.
Presenters and facilitators
- Writer-Artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art Emma Cocker (Nottingham Trent University)
- Writer and Professor of Interdisciplinary Writing Maria Fusco (University of Dundee)
- Choreographer and Senior Lecturer in Dance & Choreography Katrina Brown (Falmouth University)
Presenters and facilitators from Uniarts Helsinki
- Artist-Researcher and University Researcher Alex Arteaga
- Poet and University Researcher Aino-Kaisa Koistinen
- Performance Artist and University Researcher Pilvi Porkola
- Dance Artist and Professor of Artistic Research Leena Rouhiainen
Contact information
-
Leena Rouhiainen
- Johtaja, Tutkimusinstituutti, Tutkimus ja tohtorikoulutus
Professori, Teatterikorkeakoulu, Teatterikorkeakoulu - +358400792093
- leena.rouhiainen@uniarts.fi