Reading Rooms: stages for rewriting and re-reading the book
Introduction
Research Project Description
The Reading Room is a creative model, devised, designed and executed by artist-researcher Julia Bardsley, that offers the opportunity to investigate specific strategies for rewriting the act of ‘reading’.
The Reading Rooms function as laboratories, sites for performance research, specifically in relation to approaches and methodologies that can be applied to acts of reading and writing, reworking what we think the book might be as a cultural object, and to issues of access to language, texts, meaning, knowledge and modes of thinking.
The research was conducted predominantly within and across Bardsley’s three Reading Rooms, which repurposed a political, a philosophical and an entomological text: Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism (2009), Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1964) and Maurice Maeterlinck's The Life of the Bee (1901).
Each of these Reading Room events comprised a durational performance installation, with the length of each event being set by the time it took for the chosen text to be read aloud, from cover to cover. The audience could come and go in the space at will and were invited to listen, while simultaneously encountering a designed installation, a series of objects and artefacts, and performed interventions and activities.
Each of the rooms responded to the specificity of the base text and author, developing a particular set of spatial, physical and material vocabularies of rewriting.