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Participate in this storytelling and writing workshop led by Hannah Clarkson, pondering on our multiple, collective bodies and their vocabularies.

Join us in tracing how words move through the body – the mouth, the ear, the hand – to the world and to the page. The workshop invites us to ask how we write the body, express its sufferings and sensations, its aches and amusements, in words that are at once too much and not enough. Can writing itself be autoimmune? If so, how can we harness care-in-excess as exuberance? How do we move from pain to play?

This workshop approaches the care-in-excess of an autoimmune body, the misbehaviour of a nervous system, misfiring synapses and mischievous syntaxes. We will explore the repetition of a response we have learned, a word we have said so often that we are no longer sure what it means. Together, we will reflect on the slippages in understanding of language mispronounced, sounds said otherwise – the couldn’t-care-less exuberance of getting it wrong – or of letting our mouths tell other stories than those we thought defined our bodies and our lives.

To take part, bring a word with you. A word with many synonyms. A word which will begin a story, then two, then three, then four. The stories will write themselves. Let us write with care, excessively, exuberantly. Let us let the words do the talking. Our words will tell us what to say.

This session is part of the year-long project common /play\ grounds led by yasamin and sass.  common /play\ grounds sides with our new programme strand Mujaawarah (neighbouring) striving to nurture rootedness and community, shared wisdom and wellbeing.

Hannah Clarkson is a writer and visual artist with an interest in storytelling, voice, and embodied languages of empathy. Following a BFA from Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University (2013) and an MFA from Konstfack, Stockholm (2017), her current practice-led PhD at Royal College of Art, London—The Absurd Art of A(r)mour: Playful Strategies of Resistance, Costumes of Care and Decorum for the Autoimmune Body—investigates fictioning-as-resistance through artistic and literary expressions of autoimmunity, absurdity and armour. Recent publications include: a short story and poetry collection on Shelter (ed., 2020); The Green Room: Perspectives on Artistic Research (ed., 2018); and ‘Raising the Voice’ (Journal of Artistic Research, 2021), an essay on voice and narrative in contemporary sculpture. Since 2020, Clarkson has taught creative writing for artists at Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm, leading courses investigating shelter through experimental storytelling; writing and artistic practice as tools for expressing bodily experience of illness and gender; scores, voice and the performative ‘everyday’ body; and discursive, decolonial approaches to creative writing and architectural practice-led research.