The Netherlands,
2021

A performative writing workshop through which notions of productivity and value in the neoliberal west are questioned. Who or what is productive? Who can be said to produce value? And how to be productive otherwise? Through a series of performative exercises in which body, voice and rhythm become tools for research and experimentation, this workshop aims to set up a space for doing otherwise. A doing otherwise, together, that is not based on profit, accumulation or economic growth. The research finds its inspiration in music and the notion of polyphony which is conceived as a methodology for doing and being together, in contrast to the western idea of individualism (as idea of autonomy).
     As a trained musician, polyphony came naturally to me by sharing my musical experience with others. I developed a practice that has parallels to music and language. By playing around the notions of performativity and performative utterances, expressing words becomes an act of doing-making. Informed by the reality-producing capacity of language (through defining what is meaningful within a field of possibilities, what it means to matter) this workshop enables polyphonic realities to emerge (Reworlding). A practice of doing otherwise is proposed, comprehending the design tools of writing and reading out loud inspired by music. The writing process has a propositional dimension of doing: how actions can be taken with words; the jointly reading out loud activates what I named “the intimate strike”: how actions can organize and give significance.
0. Listening Otherwise, “the intimate strike”; ph. Femke Reijerman