Springe direkt zu Inhalt

Reading Reading. On an Aesthetic Practice (2024–)

Barbara Bausch, Research Area 4: "Literary Currencies"
Professional-Track Postdoctoral Project

 
In the face of global predicaments in which there is an urgent need to fundamentally rethink social relations amidst a spreading feeling of powerlessness, contemporary literary production is reacting with a re-evaluation of political writing. It is not only in German-speaking countries that a reflection on the potency of aesthetic practices through intensified work on the literary form can be observed – namely on an open, unstable, dynamised form that places reading as an aesthetic, community-building and potentially critical practice at the centre of attention. On the one hand, the texts explicitly expose themselves as texts fed by the practice of reading and inscribing themselves in transtemporal discourses and communities; on the other hand, they attempt to model spaces of experience and reflection through their formal design rather than immersive readings. Readers are overtly addressed as participants in a communal "literary work" (Barthes) and encouraged to engage in self-reflective, interventionist reading.

The project is thus dedicated to reading as an aesthetic, i.e. (according to Reckwitz) self-referential, creative, affective, experimental and potentially political practice. Between receptivity and collaboration, reading is an act in which subjects and entities are first formed in a relational exchange. It is an act which, through communication, can create or strengthen cross-temporal and transcultural connections, reorganise the view of the past as well as the present and can be regarded as an arena for social self-understanding.

But reading as a practice between human actors, genres, media or political projects is notoriously difficult to observe—according to Christian von Herrmann and Jeannie Moser, it can only be tracked down "in flagranti". The Professional Track Postdoc project responds to this challenge with a twofold approach. On the one hand, it approaches the subject from the perspective of literary studies via theoretical and literary texts that have transferred the knowledge of reading into their form, asking how processes of inclusion and exclusion are textually staged, modelled and evoked. On the other hand, it sounds out the connection between individual and communal, quiet and loud reading and the creation of temporary and transtemporal communities in actual embodied performance by means of explorative collaborative formats. At the junction of scientific and artistic procedures, the project investigates how literature as a material, social and performative practice that only exists in action is realised and transformed in the practice of everyday, academic and literary reading and how it can be socially effective as aesthetic doing, "a provocation, a rebellion" (Cixous).

 

Events & Formats

Featured Format | READING READING: IL/LEGIBLE

The format "IL/LEGIBLE" engages with reading in a transdisciplinary investigation starting from its absolute limit: the illegible. The results of this exploration in the form of essays, performances, visual works and work-shop concepts by thirteen artists and scholars from a broad variety of disciplines will be presented to the public at large in the publication "Illegibilities Reflecting Reading" (con·stel·la·tions 03) and at an event at daadgalerie on 18 March 2025.

In cooperation with the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program.

Workshops, Exhibition, Talks & Performances | READING READING ROOM: Dealing with Illegibility (March 2025)

We commonly understand 'reading' as a mental technique that involves the visual recognition of written signs, the actualisation of the sound image of words and the comprehension of their meaning. But at the same time, reading produces something that cannot be derived from what is read alone. In response to this difficulty, READING READING ROOM brings together scholars and artists to explore and discuss the precarious practice of reading by reflecting on its absolute limit: the illegible.

Performance Workshop | How to Sing a Picture? (March 2025)

For about 15 years, the visual and sound poet Kinga Tóth has been making performances, in which she 'sings' visual works by responding with vocal gestures to filmed and projected graphic poems and drawings, understanding these interpretations of her visual poetry as three-dimensional 'living text bodies' simply as 'readings'. The aim of this workshop is to build bridges between languages and reading practices and to celebrate the creation, the sounding together.

Workshop | Mapping Textual Spaces: Visual Strategies to Approach the Unreadable (March 2025)

The workshop invites participants to explore reading material as a visual, structural, and interpretive process. Together, we will engage with unreadable textual artifacts, seeking new insights through artistic visual analysis, and documenting our reading process through mappings.