ONLINE PUBLICATION

The publication comprising MANUAL and DOCUMENTATION is published on the occasion of Emma Haugh’s contribution to the project dissident desire, Chapter 1: Exercises in Critical Bodybuilding curated by Suza Husse and Lorenzo Sandoval at District / 24 October – 7 December 2013. The materials of the publication were generated during the workshop READING TROUPE #01. Physical Education. Exercises In Embodying Discourse by the artist on 2 – 3 November 2013.

How can we dislocate and relocate the qualities of intelligence?

How can we begin to re-align the boundaries, stretching out ideas to points of rupture, generating something altogether unexpected, surprising and new?

What if we call upon the many knowings inscribed in our flesh, our bones, our central nervous systems, organs, joints, limbs?

How can an idea be swallowed and allowed to move through us and transform us?

Within Emma Haugh’s READING TROUPE series of performative workshops, the “readers” are invited to participate in an active embodiment of knowledge dissemination and production. This collaborative practice is an attempt to collectively enter the body of a chosen text through gesture rather than verbal language and slip between the words and into its arteries, veins, finding its pulse through the bodies of the “readers”/ participants. The READING TROUPE # 01 unfolded over the course of two days in a set of games of physical and verbal misbehaving, exercises in imaginative dissonance and techniques of becoming and inhabiting a text, which were recorded through reflexive documentation strategies. Located between reading group and theatre rehearsal applying techniques by Augusto Boal, this intensive workshop encouraged each participant to become a critical agent who performs what might be living within the text Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmapornographic Era by philosopher Beatriz Preciado (2013).

READING TROUPE # 01

Physical Education. Exercises In Embodying Discourse

Concept and editing by Emma Haugh and Suza Husse

© District, Emma Haugh, authors and participants, 2013.