The Reading Room was initiated by Sissel Marie Tonn and Jonathan Reus in 2014. I joined as a co-facilitator in 2017. The initiative invites artists and theorists to close-read, share their knowledge, and guide participants through key texts within their field of expertise.
Close-reading is tremendously beneficial for professional and young artists alike, who either no longer have or are seeking to expand the peer group and mentors for working through challenging writing. Keeping a close connection to important historical and emerging contemporary theory within art and culture is invaluable to artists who want to engage with difficult and pressing topics in their practice.
The Reading Room gathered an impressive number of renowned thinkers and academics and provided a context for them to make their fields of expertise communicable to a wide audience. We encouraged in-depth conversations that are conceptually rich, yet relatively light in their discursive style — truly a unique point of access for the artistic community.
Guests have included: Eric Kluitenberg, Sher Doruff, Toni Pape, Rick Dolphijn, Iris van der Tuin, Wybo Houkes, Jamie Allen, Will Schrimshaw, Charlotte Farrell, Thijs Witty, Maciej Ożóg, Marco Donnarumma, Archipelago Lab, Yvonne Volkart, Julia Bee, Christoph Brunner, Alanna Thain, Nikki Forrest, Nishant Shah, Marcel Cobussen, Andrej Radman, Yvonne Förster, Jaime del Val, Warrick Roseboom, Joel Ryan, Raviv Ganchrow, Douglas Kahn, Florian Cramer, Rebekka Kiesewetter, Joana Chicau, Alessandro Ludovico, Amelia Groom, Aurélie Nyirabikali Lierman and Lila Athanasiadou.
Halfway into the lifetime of The Reading Room, it became apparent how valuable the kind of knowledge this methodology of study was creating, and also, at the same time, how ephemeral. In 2017 The Reading Room started an effort to create notes — through discussions between the facilitators and guests — that could work as a unique kind of documentation: not to perfectly inscribe and transfer the unique and individual insights of all people present, but to spark new understandings in future readers of the texts. This note-taking effort evolved quickly into a series of 12 online micro-publications called Relay Conversations.
