Writing-Reading Laboratory 2045
An iteration of [UN]COMMON THREADS held with Xaraxura Press, asking participants to write from within a 2045 in which a pervasive instability known as The Trembling has become a central condition of life.
- Date
- Format
- Workshop
- Venue
- Xaraxura Press
- Location
- Tbilisi, Georgia
For much of recent history, the act of writing was guided by a set of powerful conventions: the ideal of a coherent, singular authorial self, set apart from the messy realities of the body and the surrounding world. This tradition placed a rational, human gaze at the centre of knowledge production and shaped dominant ideas about narrative, genre, and truth. As literary and critical theory evolved, these certainties were systematically challenged, exposing the self as a linguistic construct and the binaries of Western thought as politically charged fictions.
Over the past decades, these critiques have inspired a wave of experimental practices. From autotheory to embodied poetics and more-than-human storytelling, contemporary writers have sought to dissolve the boundaries between the self and the other, the textual and the material. Yet questions remain: What will the world look like in the future, and how will the practice of writing reflect it? Will storytelling remain a largely individual act, or will new collaborative and more-than-human models emerge? How can writers forge spaces for creation that are adequate to the trembling realities of the world to come?
The Laboratory placed participants in 2045, in a world where a pervasive instability known as The Trembling is a central condition of life. One group wrote from the subjective perspective—from inside the experience, focused on a self that trembles, human, nonhuman or something in between. The other wrote from the objective perspective—turning its gaze outward toward the forces, beings and phenomena that either cause the trembling or are wit(h)nessed within it.