Writing, Language and Site, the 2010 ANTI Seminar

This year’s ANTI seminar is focused on writing, language and site. Built around a series of short-form presentations that quickly open out into discussion, the seminar variously asks: how does writing operate in public space? What are the performative possibilities of thinking about writing and reading in an expanded sense? What compositional techniques and methodologies allow artists to engage with the written and spoken word when working contextually? An international group of academics, artists and writers will discuss these issues through prepared papers, artists’ talks and performance lectures.
The seminar is co-curated by Larry Lynch (Department of Performance and Performance Writing Research Group at University College Falmouth); artist and editor Pilvi Porkola (Esitys journal), artist and coordinator Maija Hirvanen (Edge of Europe) and ANTI Festival. The ANTI seminar is chaired by Maija Hirvanen.

The participation fee is 25 € / day or 60 € / three days. For students, unemployed and members of artists’ associations the fee is 20 €/ day or 50 € / three days. Registration by 24th of September at +358 50 3052 005 or .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). The seminar is held in Kummisedän aitta, Minna Canthin katu 44.

PRESENTATIONS

Larry Lynch
Taking the recently designated field of Performance Writing as both context and impetus, this talk considers the ways in which language and textuality can be understood as ‘performing’ subjectivities and cultural identities in contemporary practices that extend their reach beyond the structures and strictures of the literary page.
Larry Lynch studied Performance Writing at Dartington College of Arts, after which he completed a doctoral thesis entitled ‘The Difficult Impossible: writing, performance and the subject’. He is an artist and writer who has presented performance and audio-visual work at numerous galleries and festivals in the UK and mainland Europe. He publishes poems and poem sequences for the page, as well as essays on writing and performance. He edits the artist-led initiative Acts of Language, and lives in West Cornwall, where he works as Head of the Department of Performance and Performance Writing Research Group at University College Falmouth.

Kira O’Reilly: artist statement

Emma Cocker: Performing Communities
Emma Cocker will explore (site-specific) writing’s capacity to produce critical communities, specifically the form of ‘temporary invented community’ - a term that theorist Miwon Kwon uses to describe those specific social configurations ‘newly constituted and rendered operational through the coordination of the art work itself.’ Her presentation will involve the critical interrogation of forms of instructional or propositional writing that specifically invite participatory performative actions (in the public realm), or which produce communities of readers who become temporarily (and potentially visibly) bound by the terms of a given text.
Emma Cocker is an art-writer and a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University. Operating under the title ‘Not Yet There’, her writing and text-based work often explores models of practice - and subjectivity - which resist or refuse the pressure of a single or stable position by remaining willfully unresolved. She is currently working on the research project Performing Communities, and a forthcoming book entitled Desiring to be Led Astray: The Art of Wandering.

Jane Jin Kaisen: ‘Itinerary for a performance: engaging site, translation, and inter-subjectivity’ Jane Jin Kaisen presents her work on the quality of the itinerant and ideas of itineraries in performance related writing. Within the open-ended form of the itinerary she has tried to establish a concept forperformance, which allows for an imaginative inter-subjective engagement with site, language, and meeting, which simultaneously asks critical questions about modes of representation and the politics of site and translation.
Jane Jin’s artwork explores how historical narratives, memory, and ideology are constructed and influence our perception and thinking. From a postcolonial and feminist perspective her work is invested in deconstructing the complex intersections of race, class, and gender in a transnational perspective in order to pose alternative narratives and forms of representation. Jane Jin has performed at numerous international biennials and festivals alongside developing various curatorial projects.
http://www.itinerantsendsforitinerant.org.

Pilvi Porkola: CAT concepts, acts, traces (in Finnish) CAT is a participatory art project built around the creating, performing and documenting of scores. Pilvi gives an overview of the project, begin in 2008, focusing on the score as performative act and text. To CAT participants working with scores offers a wide range of interpretations, allowing for various performative outcomes and directions to be explored.
Pilvi Porkola is a performance artist and researcher. Her doctoral study in Theatre Academy is titled “Notes on politics, documenting and personal in performance”. She is also working as a chief editor of Esitys journal.

John Hall: Order words / public shapes
Some of John Hall’s recent visual texts respond to the functions and symbolic shapes of road signs and penalty notices but with a vocabulary that invokes quite different orders of exchange – for example personal and domestic rather than public. John will show some of these pieces and talk about the written words encountered all the time in shared space.
John Hall is a poet, teacher and essayist who has worked at Dartington College of Arts (now incorporated into University College Falmouth) in the UK since 1976 and whose first book of poems was published in 1968. He led the group that planned the first Performance Writing degree at Dartington. His poems are written both for pages and for frames. As well as published books he has had a number of exhibitions in recent years.
http://www.johnhallpoet.org.uk.

Rosie Dennis; artist statement  

Caroline Bergvall: artist statement

Maija Hirvanen: Being In a Wrong Skin: site and physical culture in the performance On Ice (in Finnish)
Maija Hirvanen’s presentation deals with the themes of site and physical culture in her performance On Ice and the new version On Ice Anti. The text Hirvanen has prepared for the presentation is based on dialogue of the text and physical action developed for the performer. Actions and language selected from On Ice’s performance choreography are recontextualised for this discursive environment.
Maija Hirvanen is a Finnish performance maker, choreographer and writer. Maija leads Edge of Europe, a programme of events focused on writing’s relationship to performance, hosted by Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki. Presentation by Maija Hirvanen, together with dancer Anna-Maija Terävä

Timo Heinonen: Writing, death and the space of performance (in Finnish)
Timo Heinonen’s presentation focuses on the various relationships between writing, death and performance. Here the ‘stage of separation’ offers an introduction to the unknown.
Timo Heinonen is a lecturer at the department of lighting and sound design in the Theatre Academy of Finland and the head of the contemporary theatre studies. His scientific writing and artistic practice is focused on the questions of performance theory, technology and dramaturgy within the contexts of continental philosophy and posthumanism. He is currently working on a number of performance projects, an audio piece for radio and a forthcoming book on Aristotle’s poetics (Teos 2010).