Workshop: tremoring the archive with Joshua Leon at Bow Arts Courtyard

Join writer, poet, and artist Joshua Leon in a writing workshop interrogating ideas around documentation, disrupting the archive through memoir, and the potency of minor and common histories.
This workshop is about the force of writing and the feel of “documents.” We will be thinking through the ways in which writing – in particular the writing of memoir – can be used to re-address history and the archive.

Drawing on the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of his practice, Joshua will expand from the research he produced for his exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery which collapsed personal family narratives with the history of the site and East London.

Beginning with a group reading of Suely Rolnik’s Archive Mania, and moving into a discussion about the text, we will question what a document can be, what the poetic force of documents is, and the ways in which the archive and its documents can be intervened with or altered.

We will then begin to think about writing, considering how any form of writing – be it the poem, the letter, the short story, the memoir, the novel, or even the note – might perform an invaluable function in producing the alterations we seek in the archive. To do this, we will work on two short writing exercises, the first of which will think through memory, and the second focusing on how to turn a document into a subject. For this second exercise, the paintings from the exhibition ‘In the footsteps of the East London Group’ will be invited to be treated as documents.

All writing and reading materials will be provided.