Transitory writing in no one’s land

Application summary

The research proposal transitory writing in no one’s land improves and diversifies artistic research and its corresponding writerly methods by developing, testing and advocating for new practices of research writing that focus on collective, situated, embodied, performative, and multi-lingual approaches to language. The practice of writing as a multi-lingual and collective activity offers the potential for participants to become aware of one’s cultural disposition. Moreover, the newness at stake is writing lifted from a solitary to a collective experiential practice bridging the corporeal and cerebral. The aim is to examine how collective writing as method and activated co-authorship might create conditions for inter-subjective relations and the emergence of inclusive in-between spaces or no one’s lands. This interdisciplinary research, comprising critical theory, literary and visual arts, is structured as a transnational itinerary in five diverse sites for learning; schools, centres and universities, in four countries having an impact as temporary communities for workshops in collective writing. These workshops build on the notion of linguistic bodies constituted by relational utterances and hosting an urge for unfinished becoming (Di Paolo, Cuffari, and De Jaegher 2018). It is this unfinished becoming as learning, as being in transition, and as transitory writing, that is sustained in the workshops rather than an accumulation of knowledge by didactic approaches. The constituent research question is: How can language and writing be an inter-subjective potential? The objectives of transitory writing in no one’s land are to develop a series of artworks, audio-essays and presentations that activate discoveries of spatial reciprocity, the no one’s land, for audiences beyond academia and to develop seminaries, as well as journal articles and research expositions, for sharing and showing this body of research and its insights with a wider research community.