Edinburgh Napier University

  Suspending Artistic Research Writing as Meaning-Making

Tender Dialogues was a 3-hour workshop which took place on 2 July 2022 activated within the frame of the 13th Society of Artistic Research Conference (Mend, Blend, Attend) held at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.

The workshop was initiated by Emma Cocker and Lena Séraphin. Participants: Annette Arlander, Emma Cocker, Cordula Daus, Lena Séraphin, Niina Turtola, Andy Weir, Natalia Castilllo Rincón and Hinnerk Utermann.

The workshop aimed to assess artistic research writing as a practice of meaning-making by proposing the suspension of end results in favour of collaborative thought processes. The Tender Dialogues workshop was inspired by the writings of Georges Perec and his book An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris that acknowledges overlooked phenomena in a Parisian square in 1974.1 The aim was to further develop Perec’s writing experiment by collectively making a non-conclusive inventory of public space, rather than referencing the book. The workshop explored observational writing on civic space: it consisted of conversations, readings and writings that challenged language as representation. The procedural approach disentangles writing from singular perspectives and suspends writing from meaning making by an epistemic inquiry that advances open-minded dialogue.

In this 180min workshop, we tested writing in public space beginning with a prompt outlining the role of a sole writer by noting singular words about phenomena in our field of vision. From there we continued to write as a group, a collective that decided on a spatial score for the writers on site, where the observational writing is tested on behalf of bodily perception and sensation. The third prompt continued to be based on bodily awareness, but the writers now moved and wrote simultaneously in a pattern that was collectively decided on. This third writing prompt rejected naming and nouns, inspired by quantum theory. Each of the three writing sessions were merged with readings and discussions about the experiences of writing and the diverse textual qualities buoyed by a procedural approach. The prompts demonstrate how writing has capacities for forming affinities, how writing can be a collective attempt and therefore attend to reflective collaboration.