The love of writing, or writing as love/r:
Collaborative writing as shared visual art studio practice
Written by: Fouad Asfour, Londiwe Mtshali, Mujahid Safodien, Pebofatso Mokoena, Philiswa Lila, Saajidah Madhi & Vidya Chagan
Draw with your non-dominant hand
Write without pen and paper
Listen to shapes and colours
Follow the scent of consonants and vowels
Gargle text and spit it out
Taste a fading sound
Visual artists and students have been gathering to write since 2020, to explore and experiment with writing in a quest to expand, minituarise, exemplify and entangle how artists do use writing processes in and as part of their creative practices.
Over time, writing turned into a shared concern and collaborative practice. In each meeting, we devised new writing experiments which opened up exchange and discussion around questions such as:
- How does writing and visual art texture our senses and tap into embodied knowledges?
- How do we experience writing processes, outside of thinking, reflecting and understanding?
- How does it feel to write across languages and media?
- How do we follow the desire that unfolds in writing and artmaking?
- How do we situate ourselves in processes of “sharing” in writing groups, which transcend individual creative processes?
- How can we share individual studio practices, allow each other into the intimate space of creative processes?
- How can we turn to writing as healing?
- How can we expand writing inot collective creative practices?
For the CKR publishing project, we have created an experimental piece of writing as a practice-led research multi-text. Members of the writing group submitted their writings, drawings and/or visual works which reflects on writing as visual art studio practice and writing processes, exercises and topics we discussed. This multi-text aims to communicate our perception of silences, or perhaps blind spots in writing about visual art across languages. Mostly, writing appears as a tool of critical reflection and critical practice in an encounter with visual art or as appreciation of letters, words, concepts, script as formal/visual elements, while at times in the expanded field of conceptual or performative practice. In contrast, this group became a community of writing artists and writing-practitioners. Writing filled our pages not as a function, but as shared gestures of reflection. Language does not appear as a normative tool, but as bodily, embodied practice. Our text exemplifies how writing can perform as artists’ studio practice, and while it is informed by, it remains tangential to visual art theories, art history and familiar notions of art writing. Thus, our work invites resistant experimentation to exemplify practices of (un-) languaging through (un)-writing in collective creative practices.
https://www.creativeknow.org/bopawritersforum/the-love-of-writing
This is the start of a long-term practice-led research project on the role of creative writing in visual artists’ studio practices led by Fouad Asfour in collaboration with the writing group members.
