Experimental Writing Workshop

In 2016, I attended Textlab, the experimental writing workshop led by Dimitra Ioannou. It was a highly engaging seminar combining theory and practical exercises, introducing us to Mallarmé, Apollinaire, and Georges Perec, the Argentinian Noigandres group, Kenneth Patchen, and concrete poetry

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It was a seminar that taught us to approach text in different ways: as something individual but also collective; as content or as image (through hieroglyphs, ideograms, visual effects, and typographic interventions); as a vehicle for meaning or for the dismantling of meaning. As part of the workshop, I was introduced to what we call collaborative writing.

A few years later, together with friends, we created a collaborative text of this kind, consisting of 20 stories written by 20 different people. Participants were allowed to read only the text immediately preceding their own contribution. The result was a wonderfully eccentric story full of twists and turns.

The text was illustrated, laid out, and published (by the visual arts collective Dryokolaptis) in 22 copies—one for each participant and two for the archive.