Reader’s Biography

A lot of my work is based on exploring and learning from texts and works by others. I try not to have preconceived ideas about what I will do and prefer to let the work that I’m reading/viewing/listening show me the way. More often than not this ends up challenging my prior working methods, the way I research and source up my thinking. It shifts the language and poetics I adopt, the types of media and situations I create. All in all it is a very intimate, demanding and dialogic process. I work with these materials in very detailed ways and let them take me down routes and visions that seek out of the harsh impasses of my own time.

Reader’s Biography

Why read? To engage. Why write? To engage. Why both at once? To understand myself, my imagination, my imagination of others, myself in relation to others. In reading, writing, and translating, I'm looking for places that don't immediately emerge: a meeting of something made, someone writing, someone listening. I'm looking for ways to breathe within those distances. Maybe the loss of sharing, and sharing that loss, can fashion a community without imposing it. Maybe.  

Reader’s Biography

As a very young child, Lilian picked up reading early so she could be left alone. Doing so, she found that she also picked up a habit she could not lose. Her books have moved with her across four cities over the last three decades. She is able to tell you which publishers produce books that can endure the hot and humid tropics and which do not. Her reading taste is rather eclectic though there is a discernible pattern: detective novels, Margaret Atwood, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion, Arundhati Roy, Rebecca Solnit, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Michael Taussig. She wishes she had learnt literature properly instead of reading sciences and mathematics. A huge fan of the London Review of Books, she hopes she can contribute something to that paper one day.

Reader’s Biography

As a reader, Anna tends to read a few books closely, rather than consuming many. There is a convenience involved in pulling the same book out from the bookshelf, again and again. Or perhaps she enjoys the sense of safety and comfort that familiar pages might offer? Christian Norberg-Schulz introduced her to the work of Rainer Maria Rilke, which she is exploring at a slow pace. Ali Smith is another intriguing favorite, alongside Sharon Kivland. The only exception to her reading habits is that when she is working through difficulties, she finds that reading Scandinavian crime novels at a fast pace offers her a sense of calm.

Reader’s Biography

Books pile up on my bedside table (which is actually an appropriated chair). Poetry, literature, theory etc. – old and new. The stack itself has been there for quite a long time, constantly changing, with new additions and, very rarely, finished books that move back to the shelf. In Mary Modeen’s and Iain Biggs’ words, I consider my reading habit to be transversal, navigating different regions of the book stack – that I regard as a site of engagement – in a slow residency, very close to my head and dreams.

Readers’ Biographies

Iain is and always has been an insatiable, omnivorous, and wholly unsystematic reader (and very occasional reviewer). He has accurately described himself as, academically speaking, a ‘polite trespasser’ across numerous fields. However he has a particular interest in writing by authors whose testimonial imagination enquires in places and their times with one eye on the present, in science fiction in the tradition of Ursula LeGuin, and with novelists and scholars concerned with folklore and related ethnographic topics. That said, he has spent much of the COVID-19 pandemic reading the poetry and prose essays of women Irish poets. 

Like Iain, Mary is also a voracious reader, and someone who seems inevitably to be a connection-maker, both in writing and art. Partly, this stems from a lifelong peripatetic wandering across the world, facilitated by education and research. Encounters inevitably seem to bring new people, places, stories, and learning into combination with other places and traditions. This plays out in books as well, with stimulating novels, poetry, and histories, which are generative of new connections, much in the way that Olivia Laing applies her astute perceptions to art and literature, and E.B. White wrote of the profound in everyday occurrences. 

Readers’ Biographies

Simon Morris (UK) is co-editor of Inscription: the Journal of Material Text – Theory, Practice, History [with Gill Partington & Adam Smyth], Professor of Art and Director of Research for Art & Design at Leeds Beckett University. In 2002, he founded the publishing imprint information as material (iam) [with Craig Dworkin & Kaja Marczewska] which publishes work by artists and writers who use extant material — selecting it and reframing it to generate new meanings — and who, in doing so, disrupt the existing order of things. www.informationasmaterial.org / www.inscriptionjournal.com Jérémie Bennequin (FR) has been developing an interdisciplinary practice as an artist that focuses on themes of time, memory, and erasure. Drawing is at the heart of his visual arts practice and literature has consistently been found to be the raw material for his work and the catalyst for his ideas. He is well known for having erased the work of Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, following a rigorous methodology of one page a day for a project that lasted ten years. www.jeremiebennequin.com  Valérie Steunou (FR) studied at Rennes University and went on to teach French Literature at Exeter University and University College Dublin. In 2001, she changed career direction and became a primary school teacher in York. For her current role, she works as a Special Educational Needs Coordinator (SENCO), supporting children with SEND by securing additional funding and advising and training colleagues to develop inclusive practice. She is currently working with over eighty children with SEND across four schools. Tom Rodgers (UK) is an artist and designer based in York. His practice engages mainly with photography but also includes graphic design, book design and writing. He lectured in Photography at York College before moving to Leeds Beckett University. Tom hold’s an MA in Contemporary Art Photography from Edinburgh College of Art and has recently begun a Practice-Based PhD at Leeds Beckett University in the School of Arts. He is one third of Gordian Projects, an independent, none-profit publishing collective, exploring the intersection of art-making, artist writing, text and imagery through collaborative processes. https://tom-rodgers.com / https://gordianprojects.com

Readers’ Biographies

Lidia Gasperoni is a Research and Teaching Associate at the Department of Architectural Theory of the Institute of Architecture at the Technical University Berlin. She studied philosophy in Rome, Freiburg, Breisgau, and Berlin and obtained her PhD from the TU Berlin. She teaches architectural theory and philosophy with a focus on media philosophy, Anthropocene theories, and aesthetics at the TU Berlin, and previously at the UdK Berlin and the University of Kassel. Her publications include: Versinnlichung (De Gruyter, 2016); Media Agency, with Christophe Barlieb (transcript, 2020); Artefakte des Entwerfens, with Anna Hougaard et al. (TU Verlag, 2020); Site of Coexistence (IQD, 2021); and Construction and Design Manual: Experimental Diagrams (DOM publishers, forthcoming). Alex Arteaga is an artist researcher who combines and hybridizes aesthetic, phenomenological, and enactivist research practices through an inquiry into embodiments, environments, and aesthetic cognition. He studied music theory, piano, electronic music, composition, and architecture in Barcelona and Berlin and received a PhD in Philosophy at the Humboldt University Berlin. He has been Visiting Professor in different universities and educational centers, such as the University of the Arts Helsinki and the Berlin University of the Arts and has developed long-term artistic research projects such as Architecture of Embodiment (www.architecture-embodiment.org) or Contingent Agencies (www.contingentagencies.net).

Reader’s Biography

My home is full of things to read – books and journals relating to my research, some written by friends and colleagues, quite a few from my university days, a smattering of novels, and a small library of metaphysical texts. Their numbers continue to grow, with all available shelves full, more than a dozen neatly-stacked towers have come to line the windowsill that spans the length of my living room. I’ve read a good many of them from cover to cover, several more than once, while there are others of which I’ve still only penetrated the first pages or have moved intuitively to the sections that catch my attention, missing others. There’s not one that hasn’t been cradled and pondered and cracked open at some point or another, and I maintain a strong visual and tactile map of their shapes and shades and volumes. My way of living directly with these printed materials is very different than how I relate to the folders of readings stored on my laptop – not only by virtue of their physical presence, but in how they are wrapped up in my understandings of (and attempts at) ‘slow reading’: languorously savouring a text, returning to it again and again, as to an old friend one learns a bit more about each time; reading between and beyond the lines to touch other dimensions of experience and/or spatial and temporal coordinates; but sometimes also drifting away so much in a text that one has lost the thread, finding oneself instead gently suspended at the fuzzy edges of the mind … Reading as a portal to reverie.

Readers’ Biography

When MYCKET is reading and reviewing we are trying to live with the text. We have spent time together with the book, cherishing its materiality and bringing it home to our current locations. That is, the temporary heartlands where we are doing the reading. We allow ourselves to respond by doing. This review attempts to build on the performative force of the book to create further meaning involving our artistic practices; making notes on the pages and drawings that were born out of the words we read, collecting items “trash/treasures” from the heartlands where we read, archiving them between the pages and assembling them as models and amulets.

Reader’s Biography

I am a thinker and practitioner of what is increasingly called artistic research. For years, my work and my life were divided between artistic practice and critical thought. I therefore arrive to this growing field with a strong sensation of pressure directed to generating new forms. As an editor, I do my best to support the development of such forms, while as a practitioner I am relentlessly critical of them. I dislike writing reviews, because I prefer to examine works for the contributions they make and leave critique to wider discussions. But I am grateful for this opportunity to exchange.

Reader’s Biography

Emma Cocker is a disorderly reader – with piles of books in different locations, where reading unfolds through the movement between: in the shifts and slippages from one book to another; in the chance encounter between the lines, in the gaps and intervals, the moments of pause. On her table, now. Radical Attention. The Inner Touch. The Five Senses. Being Given. Matters of Care. The Disappearance of Rituals. The Ecology of Attention. Slow Philosophy. Living Thinking. Correspondences. Ethics. Power of Gentleness. Thinking in the World. In Praise of Risk. How to Land. Ethical Know-How. Letting Go. Syncope. On Becoming Aware. Aesthetics, Art, Life.

Reader’s Biography

I read the newsfeed on my phone and sometimes the paper, and e-mails – a lot. I think about novels that I want to read and then don’t read them; I read my students’ writing, my own writing and re-write. I am reading a huge catalogue titled Critical Zones: The Science and Art of Landing on Earth edited by Bruno Latour and Pieter Weibel, and a pair of very small books - Kathryn Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, and Ursula K LeGuin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction with an introduction by Donna Haraway. I am reading to my son out loud at bedtime – Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. 

Reader’s Biography

Paulette Singley shuttles back and forth between teaching architectural history-theory classes and building design studios. This dual vocation allows her to read texts as potential inspiration for studio projects and to develop writing and research as indispensable tools for studio work. This also accounts for the wide-ranging subject matter she has covered in her publication history, from Fascist Rome to architectural dollhouses, all produced through a feminist lens. For the spring of 2021 she is reading the foodscape of Rome, Italy as a recipient of the Adele Chatfield-Taylor Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome.  On the desk in front of her the following books have been consumed voraciously: Karima Moyer-Nocchi and Giancarlo Rolandi’s The Eternal Table: A Cultural history of Food in Rome, Oretta Zanini de Vita’s Popes, Peasants and Shepherds: Recipes and Lore from Rome to Lazio, Fabio Parasecoli’s Al Dente: A History of Food in Italy, Katie Parla and Kristina Gill’s Tasting Rome: Fresh Flavors and Forgotten Recipes from an Ancient City, and June di Schino’s Arte Dolciaria Barocca: I Segreti del Credenziere di Alessandri VII.

Readers’ Biographies

We are at our happiest eating the dirt of place.

Reader’s Biography

Tim Cresswell was a reader before he was a writer. When in an art gallery, he reads all the text before he looks at the art. He misses double fold album covers with all the lyrics printed inside. When he says a restaurant has a good menu – he actually means the menu. Tim tries to carry his logocentrism lightly. When at home, he can be found reading all kinds of hybrid poetry/geography/cultural theory texts including books by Maggie Nelson, Claudia Rankine, Susan Howe and Anna Tsing.  This year he was particularly struck by Richard Powers’ novel, Overstory. 

Reader's Biography

I don’t read much fiction, but am captivated by the creative writing practices of feminist artists and theorists seeking to know and live differently with/in the world. For me, this is pleasure-reading; the work is smart, the arguments compelling, and the ideas life-changing. It is a reading that connects thinking with feeling. It can be elemental and tropic, like drawing breath or turning toward the light. Or it may be immersive and fluid, like being swept along a meandering river or drifting out to sea with a changing tide. For this reader, reading matters, reading makes sense.

~

Reader's Biography

I have never known what to say ‘I am’ in disciplinary terms, any more than in my life. Professor Emerita at The Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, yes, an interdisciplinary (undisciplined) maker, digital language artist, poet, filmmaker, yes, (but not ‘professional’), feminist, yes, profoundly, though I distrust ‘isms’. Everything I make or write concerns multivalency and how this works to shift boundaries and recalibrate meanings: to enable innovation. Supervising over 25 practice-based, transdisciplinary PhDs on cultural practices is a highlight of my academic work precisely because it is defined by innovation. 

~

Readers' Biographies

Caroline Rabourdin is a slow and avid reader, an artists’ books collector. She utterly enjoys the materiality of language, lingering on the spoken as much as the printed word. She listens carefully to the words of multilingual poet Caroline Bergvall, is inspired by the essay form and the writing in becoming of Montaigne, Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber, intrigued by the linguistic gymnastics of Louis Wolfson, informed by the acuity of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and captivated by Michel Butor’s work on space and collaboration with artists. She recently bought her first book in German, by architect Arakawa and artist Madeline Gins. carolinerabourdin.com Matthew Chrislip reads from a satellite position. That is to say, he reads to relay, to translate, and to triangulate. Most recently he’s been reading (in English) twentieth-century sci-fi classics and (in French) contemporary gay autofiction and (in academia) about simultaneous interpretation. dowland.us

~

Readers' Biographies

Marko Jobst is a writer and researcher based in the UK. He has practiced architecture in Belgrade and London and taught at a number of London schools of architecture. He is currently reading Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure and Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness, and hoping that rereading his own writing after lockdown won’t make him despair. Hélène Frichot is Professor of Architecture and Philosophy and Director of the Bachelor of Design, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne, Australia, and Guest Professor in Critical Studies in Architecture, Stockholm, Sweden. While she has A. N. Whitehead’s Adventures in Ideas and Isabelle Stengers’ Thinking with Whitehead propped in a pile of other books beside her bed (true story), she is mostly just watching TV series (based on true stories) during the current pandemic lockdown. Klaske Havik is Chair of Methods & Analysis at TU Delft’s Faculty of Architecture. She just finished reading (in Dutch translation) Laurent Binet’s novel La septième fonction du langage, a fictional ‘whodunnit’, which is centred around the death of Roland Barthes in Paris 1980, and offers a hilarious portrait of the French academic scene at the time, featuring such characters as Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser. Catharina Gabrielsson is Docent in Architecture and Associate Professor in Urban Theory at the School of Architecture KTH, Stockholm. She is currently reading the collected writings of Marianne Höök (1918-1970) a Swedish socialist and feminist intellectual whose upper-class background and stylish looks prevented her from gaining full recognition for her critical thinking on politics and aesthetics.

~

Reader's Biography

For the last couple of years I (Mohamad Hafeda) have been reading texts around time and waiting, exploring the specificity of the temporal in situations of displacement, when spatial references are lost, denied or threatened. I have also been thinking of the temporality of art practices, participatory processes and forms of representation and what they could offer in responding to current struggles over space and time. Many of the writer-practitioners in The Creative Critic talk about the temporal dimension of both writing and reading; for example the associations made between (textual) materials that could be linear, simultaneous, disjointed ... More interestingly they explore care, listening, slowness and other attributes that are also temporal and offer alternative ethical practices.

~

Reader's Biography

In the last year, between us (and not always in agreement), we have read, sometimes re-read, and loved (in alphabetical order): Raymond Antrobus’ The Perseverance, Jessie Burton’s The Miniaturist, Ashon Crawley’s Blackpentecostal Breath, Jennifer Doyle’s Hold It Against Me, Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport, Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights , Laura Harris’s Experiments in Exile, Tove Jansson’s Moominland Midwinter, Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea Cycle Series, Jennifer Nash’s Black Feminism Reimagined, Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit, Phillip Pullman’s The Secret Commonwealth, Sally Rooney’s Normal People, Ali Smith’s Spring, Phil Smith’s Guidebook for an Armchair Pilgrimage, and Elizabeth Strout’s My Name Is Lucy Barton.

~

Reader's Biography

For some reason when I grew up I never read The Earthsea Cycle by Ursula le Guin, where dragons and wizards (mages) abound. Now, a keen reader of Isabelle Stengers and Donna Haraway, who both touch on Le Guin, I have finally arrived at this reading, which I also attempt to introduce to my children (still working on that). Because of Stengers, I have been reading her collaborator Didier Debaise who offers close readings of A. N. Whitehead. This finally returns me to a long-term relationship with Gilles Deleuze, always there like a kindly grandfather in the background. Readings such as these lead me to emergent spaces and encounters between architectures and philosophies. I am at home in neither disciplinary domain.

~

Reader's Biography

I am an Untimely Academic Novella Writer, PhD and Associate Professor of Social Work, Linköping University, Sweden. During 2008-2017 I founded and led the international network for Reflexive Academic Writing Methodologies (RAW), a web-based network with a book corner and a stage for performances and interviews. I am a passionate reader of small format books and texts, such as the novella, the short story, poetry and theatre. Feminist literary fiction and postcolonial writings have shaped the tone and architecture of my work and given me courage to practice emergent writing methodologies. I often re-read books and my relationship to reading is both textual and visual.

~