Attempts to locate the body are continuing: A practice-led enquiry into artists' workshops, care and non-normative writing within contemporary art institutions

'Attempts to locate the body are continuing' (ATLTB) is a collection of experimental writing in which I articulate my lived experience of running and participating in artists’ workshops. I identify workshopping as a key set of practices in contemporary art prioritising innovative sociality, collective care and non-normative methods of thinking and making together.

The emphasis on embodiment and situated forms of knowledge, in resisting the structure of the objective passive audience and the active artist practitioner, makes workshopping’s powerful effects often come across as ineffable as they emerge and are felt in an entanglement of bodies working together in the interstices of more recognisable work, learning or social contexts. Unsayability of its impact threatens its realm for expansive study, improvisation, anarchic intimacy and unique ways of being in the world. As a disabled, queer, nonbinary working class person of colour, I recognise the workshop as distinctively valuable to marginalised bodies in society.

I propose an hour-long performance of hybrid creative-critical writings, combining my PhD thesis' performance writing, fictioning, embodied poetic prose, and analytical-reflective accounts of my own invisible labour setting up queer, decolonial, working class, crip workshopping spaces, and methodological reflections to ensure ATLTB is shareable as a systemic method of artistic research, and reproducible beyond its own content and context.

'Attempts to locate the body are continuing' not only discusses, but evidences the capacities of endangered conceptual worlds to generate distinctive forms of innovation through the multiple registers and kinds of knowledge which coexist in my performance. Each one catalyses the other, across embodiment, collective organising, theoretical reflection and active accounts of praxis, making for a delicately arranged rhizomatic structure of learning and worlding through exceptional presence, sensitivity and care.