Writing for Practice Forum @ MARs (Mountain of Arts Research)

The Writing for Practice Forum is based in the Mountain of Art Research (MARs) at Goldsmiths College, and is organised by artists and researchers Kate Pickering and Rowena Harris. The forum is a peer led discursive space to gain valuable feedback on imaginative or experimental approaches with text-based material. It is open to all researchers within Goldsmiths, other CHASE institutions and beyond as either presenting writers or discussion participants and requires no prior knowledge or preparation, other than an interest in developing a deeper understanding of writing as part of practice based research.

Prior to each forum, the presenting writer chooses an excerpt of their own writing, alongside another short text by a related author as a frame of reference for the discussion. The researcher has the opportunity to invite a guest respondent to participate in the forum. Texts are available online beforehand, but pre-reading is not mandatory; we read the texts aloud at the beginning of the discussion. Researchers can attend as many or as few of the forums as their commitments allow, but are required to sign up for the session in advance.

If you would be interested in sharing your writing with us at a future forum, please get in touch with Kate Pickering kpick050@gold.ac.uk or Rowena Harris R.Harris@gold.ac.uk

Forum documentation, including the selected texts and a synopsis of the discussion will be made available after each session at: http://m-a-r-s.online/gatherings.

Writing for Practice Forum website

Forum #16 – Debbie Kent with Helen Frosi

Monday 13th July, 7 – 9 pm

Artist and PhD researcher (Goldsmiths) Debbie Kent will present some text that wrestles with the difficulty of describing and communicating the experience of soundscapes. Interdisciplinary artist, curator and producer Helen Frosi joins us as respondent.

Forum #16 will be held via zoom. Please email kpick050@gold.ac.uk for a link.Links to texts available soon.Debbie Kent: I work with sound, cities and walking. I’m currently making a set of audio walks tracking transformations in the urban soundscape for a practise-based PhD in the Visual Cultures department. I work with the spontaneous and transient; with disassembling language and retrieving detritus from the cracks in the everyday. In the past I’ve exchanged words from Bruce Springsteen lyrics with members of the public, reassembled news stories using only the conjunctions and articles, and read from the writings of George Perec after putting the pages through a shredder. Recently I have been working in collaboration with Russian artist Alisa Oleva as the Demolition Project, making work that explores ways of reimagining the city and our relationship with it, in London, Berlin, Belgrade, Vilnius, Ekaterinburg and Moscow. – dejakay.co.uk

Helen Frosi is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and producer whose practice pivots around ecological thought, poetics, aspects of gifting and alternative forms of economy, with a focus on the creative, social, and political dimension of sound and listening. Her practice manifests as process, and necessitates collaborative, cross-disciplinary work, communal projects and collective activities. Helen is Co-Curator of Longplayer Day, a festival focusing on time, duration and long-term and ecological thinking, and her latest project, EnCOUnTErs, sits at the nexus between art and ecology, with a focus on the sonic imagination. Helen is Director of SoundFjord a nomadic curatorial platform focussed on sound-related research and practice, Founder of Visible Near Midnight Recordings for works that fall between the genre gaps, and a honorary research fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London.www.soundfjord.org

Forum #18 – Katharina Ludwig with Mira Mattar

Monday 14th December | 7-9pm | Zoom

Artist, writer and PhD researcher Katharina Ludwig will present a text that has taken multiple forms: a performance lecture, artwork, conference “paper”, image description, and extended poem. Written through a poem by anarchist poet Katerina Gogou, the text addresses character study, names, speaking and writing through each other, channelling voices, radical poetry as incantation, and wounded and holey text. It will be read alongside a poem by Sean Bonney. Fiction writer and poet Mira Mattar joins us as respondent.

Forum #18 will be held via Zoom.

Both the Zoom link and the texts will be made available in the week prior to the forum. If you would like to participate, please email Katarina Rankovic at krank001@gold.ac.uk and you will be supplied with a link to enable access to the conference call.

Reading beforehand is welcome, but not mandatory, we will read texts together at the start of the discussion.

Further information as follows:

Katharina Ludwig writes and makes art. Her artworks comprise text, installation and objects. Her research in the framework of the Art Research programme at Goldsmiths, University of London, is concerned with narrative holes in women’s writing and the temporalities of the “wounded text”. Katharina tries to activate textual holes as a subversive feminist practice of resistance with insurrectional potential that treats textual wounds as a political and writerly strategy in opposition to authoritarian systems. Her work has been shown, performed or read internationally and is published by a.o. 3am Magazine, Zeno Press, Chris Airlines, MaBibliothèque

Mira Mattar writes fiction and poetry. She is an independent researcher, editor, and tutor. A Palestinian/Jordanian born in the suburbs of London, she continues to live and work there. Her first book, Yes, I Am A Destroyer was recently published by Ma Bibliothèque. Her first chapbook, Affiliation, is forthcoming from Sad Press; and her first collection of poems will be published by The 87 Press.

Forum #20 – Daniela Cascella with Jennifer Hodgson via Zoom

Monday 19th April, 6-8pm

Daniela Cascella will present an excerpt from her ongoing project on Chimeric Writing, along with extracts from Voice of Hearing by Vivian Darroch-Lozowski, Squint Press, 2020 (1984) and Mundus imaginalis, or The Imaginary and the Imaginal by Henry Corbin (1972).

Forum #20 will be held via Zoom.

The accompanying texts will be made available in the week prior to the forum. If you would like to participate, please sign up via the CHASE booking form and you will be supplied with a link to the conference call on the day of the forum. All are welcome to attend, regardless of affiliation.

Reading beforehand is welcome, but not mandatory, we will read texts together at the start of the discussion.

Further information as follows:

Daniela Cascella is an Italian writer whose texts articulate tensions and points of contact between the literary and the sonic, and propose a range of approaches to creative-critical writing through experiments with form and voice. She is the author, in English, of Singed (Equus Press, 2017), F.M.R.L. (Zer0 Books, 2015), En Abîme (Zer0 Books, 2012); and in Italian, of The Cure: The Edge of the World (Arcana, 2008), and Scultori di suono (Tuttle, 2005). Daniela lectures and publishes internationally, and often collaborates with musicians and artists in readings and editorial/curatorial projects. She is an Associate Lecturer in the MA Sound Arts at LCC / University of the Arts London, and is completing her Ph.D. at Sheffield Hallam University where she has been developing a project around Chimeric Writing that will result in two books, the former of which is forthcoming on Risking Education / Punctum Books.

www.danielacascella.com

Jennifer Hodgson is a writer and editor based in London. She is Editor-at-large at The White Review and the programmer and host of Humbermouth Literature Festival, Hull. In 2018 she published The Unmapped Country, the collected short stories of the sixties writer, Ann Quin. She is currently working on a hybrid non-fiction project based on Quin’s life that explores narrative and non-narrative forms of living, expanded experiences of consciousness and our attachments (and resistances) to writers and their work. She was previously Research Fellow at Hearing the Voice (Durham University) a Wellcome Trust-funded project investigating the phenomenon of auditory vocal hallucinations, where she led a study into voice-hearing and creativity. Prior to that, she was UK Editor at Dalkey Archive Press.