Collective Çukurcuma Água Viva workshop #2

Please join us for a workshop organised by Collective Çukurcuma focusing on collective experiments in [arts] writing. Free & open to all, though spaces are limited and booking is essential.

Água Viva workshop #2 is the second workshop in the Água Viva programme of collective experimentations on arts writing coordinated by Collective Çukurcuma. This workshop is moderated by Dr. Rebecca Miller and hosted by No Show Space. The title is taken from Água Viva a 1973 novel by the Brazilian author Clarice Lispector.

Text by Collective Çukurcuma

We are interested in how Clarice Lispector lived through her experimentation in writing, and her way of writing bounded our collective and shaped our perceptions in the last years. That’s why we would like to dedicate this program to Clarice, her fierce way of experimentation with language and words, and her relationship with writing which inspired us to challenge the institutional expectations of writing in English as our second language, especially in arts, where we bloom.

We believe Água Viva is based on these motivations:

• Discovering collective storytelling practices through a place, a dream, a sound, a memory
• Embracing the fierceness of writers like Clarice Lispector, who opened the gates for all
• Importance of experimentation in art writing
• The joy and urgency of the act of storytelling through writing
• Importance of open-sourced, shared libraries, and knowledge sources
• Creating spaces for other Mother Tongues with care

Having critically explored the Oulipo group in the previous workshop, this edition will focus on contemporary practices of literary constraint or generative engines. Such as work by Dodie Bellamy, Juliana Sphar and Stephanie Young’s Foulipo, and Joe Brainard. In 2015 Louis Bury, author of Exercises in Ciriticism: The Theory and Practice of Literary Constraint called attention to the “recent efflorescence of American constraint-based writing” (P.18). We ask the question, what does this mean about us as writers and poets even today in 2022? We extend this question to include international writing practitioners.

The participants from the first workshop are invited to bring their personal writing constraints that they conceptualized and the experiments they made following the workshop. Those that are new to the workshop will be introduced to Oulipian and contemporary literary constraints to guide them to design their own. Together we will explore ways that the experiments could be performed, collaborated with, and visualized within the gallery space. In this workshop we will consider how constraints could operate in visual arts practice and identify artists that use these techniques. We will look at the subgroup Ougrapo (Ouvrir Du Design Graphique Potentiel) and Oupeinpo (The workshop of potential painting) as case studies.

Through methods of play, collaboration, and improvisation we aim to generate innovative and performative text-based art experiments.

For more information go to Collective Çukurcuma website

Tuesday 16 August 2022 between 6 - 8 pm at No Show Space, 39 Temple Street, London E2 6QQ

Please RSVP collectivecukurcuma@gmail.com

Image credits; Photos by Rebecca Miller from ‘Derelict Water Park’ Portinatx Spain 2022