Kate Liston & Nicola Singh Up Close and Personal: Margin Notes and Critical Intimacies - Workshop

Kate Liston and Nicola Singh share an interest in experimental writing through, with and in response to the culture and format of the practice-led PhD. Kate and Nicola will jointly introduce this workshop in the Invisible Knowledge series to give an insight into how their interests meet in this field of research. They will then each give a separate workshop that draws on their own artistic experimentation.

Kate's workshop explores the bodily presentness of reading voiced by margin and footnotes [1]. Taking influence from the banal immediacy of margin notes written by monks tasked with transcribing illuminated manuscripts, we will experiment with ways of writing onto and into other texts. Medieval monks’ notes tell us: I am hungry, I need a wee, this part is boring. We will similarly consider the present-tense experience of reading and writing navigated by margin and footnotes’ tensions between public and private.

In Nicola’s workshop we will attempt to develop ‘critical intimacy’ (Gayatri Chakravorty) to/with a text, exploring notions of criticality in relation to procedures of research and knowledge production. We will workshop our ideas together as a group, responding to our contexts of location and place, encounter and dialogue(s), feelings and chance.

[1] A substantial portion of her ‘Link Zone’ thesis exists in footnotes.