Score as a State of Suspension – transitory writing in no one’s land
Emma Cocker, Lena Séraphin, Andrea Coyotzi Borja
This lecture performance shares how ‘scores’ are used for generating new embodied, performative, multi-lingual approaches to collaborative writing/reading in public space in the research project transitory writing in no one’s land.* This project addresses the transformative potential of scores as enabling constraints capable of creating conditions for emergent forms of “joint attention” (Citton, 2017), “participatory sense-making” (Di Paolo, Cuffari, De Jaegher, 2018) and “temporary community” (Kwon, 2005). Between 2022-2024, we devised and tested different scores in Finland, Mexico and Spain in diverse sites for learning. This performance lecture interweaves language-based artistic research artefacts (excerpts of experimental audio comprising non-verbal moments of ‘suspended language’, of breathing, of the body’s preparatory utterances) and spoken-word reflection on how a score-based approach to writing has enabled us to identify and test out: (1) How we are held (suspended) in language; (2) How scores might have a dual capacity to suspend – both “hold back” as well as “hold open”, liberate or release. Rather than restricting an otherwise ‘open’ way of writing, the use of scores can reveal ways in which we are ‘suspended in language’, drawing attention to subjective and culturally conditioned biases and linguistic tendencies. Each score creates a different limitation or frame, creating an ‘opening’ or discontinuity in the fabric of one’s experience, where the writer might let go or pause certain structural habits (of writing), those linguistic-perceptual patterns that structure orientation. We recognize the potential of scores for creating ruptures or even ‘nicks’ in both the perceived situation (of public space) and the perceptual habits of the writer. Between being separated from (de-) and returning to or resuming (re-) one’s habitual ways of writing, moreover, in the transition between different scores, there is a cut or caesura, a liminal moment of suspension, of tentative hesitation. Our research reveals that by inhabiting this transitory space of languaging, we open into the fluid potential of TRA: of transition (a rich potentiality experienced between stable states); of transgression (where the border of self opens to the possibility of an emergent “we”), of transformation (the bringing forth of new worlds or subjectivities). * transitory writing in no one’s land involved Emma Cocker, Andrea Coyotzi Borja, Cordula Daus, Lena Séraphin, Paul Urbano.