The Reading Room
Event series dedicated to creating a community oriented, public platform for encounters with contemporary cultural theory through collective study.
The Reading Room was initiated by Sissel Marie Tonn and Jonathan Reus in 2014, and I joined as a co-organizer in 2017. The initiative invites artists/theorists to close-read, share their knowledge and guide participants of the events 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. Especially in the international art-research world, where theory and practice seems to merge ever more seamlessly.
The Reading Room gathered an impressive number of renowned thinkers and academics and provided a context for them to explore the fields of their expertise to make them communicable to a wide audience. We have encouraged in-depth conversations that are conceptually rich, yet relatively light in their discursive style. This makes them attractive, interesting and is truly a unique point of access for the artistic community. The guests that have participated so far are:
Eric Kluitenberg, Sher Doruff, ToniPape, 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 in The Reading Room — 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.
Illustration by Sissel Marie Tonn