Collective Reading, Affective Reading

The performance is the reading of a collaged script, which consists of three voices, one of them being a collective choir (the audience is invited to join), the other two singular voices. It explores how a collective, staged form of reading can bring alive a new „collective body“ with the potential of a different „collective knowledge“, how this collectivity can be woven into a space, how the fragile state of collectivity can be kept up, how it affects the body and how it relates to individuality and the singular.

The literary material used in the performance is by protagonists of the early Russian cosmism-movement (Alexander Bogdanov, Nikolaj Federov) who theorized collective bodies and the dissolution of the subject within a collective, contrasted with fragments from feminist science-fiction (Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler and others) proposing alternative ways of human reproduction, gender and interpersonal relations.


LISTEN TO AN EXCERPT OF THE READING PERFORMANCE 15:36 min. | 2015