2023. Guest artist. Writing Workshop: The unstralatable song. Lugar a dudas. Space for Contemporary Art. Cali.

Workshop Description:

Let’s imagine that we each carry a tune within us—a sing-song, a melody so intense and painful, so personal, that it is untranslatable, impossible to verbalize. But what do we do when this untranslatable song is what we most want to express? In what language, how, if whenever I try to convey it, I can’t capture the power that the melody holds inside me? How can we use language to move closer to writing that untranslatable song? Can the body assist in that writing?

What voices, what words, what gestures of language can help us to articulate it? What ways can we find to collaborate with our own vulnerability—as poet Ocean Vuong suggests—when we write?

To use your own hand

as a pillow.

The sky does it with its clouds,

the earth with its clods

and the falling tree

with its own leaves.

Only in this way can you hear

the distance-less song,

the song that does not enter the ear

because it is in the ear,

the only song that does has no repetitions.

 

Every man needs

an untranslatable song.

 

Roberto Juarroz

 

In this workshop we investigate ways to connect with and disconnect from ourselves to write about what matters most to us. While reading fragments and texts by Clarice Lispector, Ocean Vuong, Sara Uribe, Yoko Tawada, and choreographer Twyla Tharp, among others, we will engage in writing exercises that incorporate the body, voice, materiality, and play.

The purpose of the workshop is to explore paths, habits, games, and ways of situating and dislocating ourselves to discover each participant’s unique way of following the thread of their own self.

During our four sessions, we will explore topics such as:

      • The material anchoring of the text
      • The circumstances (spatial, temporal, auditory, bodily) that surround the writing of a text
      • What if the text is music?
      • Writing from a place of unknowing
      • Writing distractedly
      • Writing
      • Writing through bodily investigation
      • Working with the text beyond the text
      • Introspective observation of the relationship between the text, my writing, and myself