WORK, HARD, TRY: A (W)reading by Rachel Lois Clapham

KALEID has just published Rachel Lois Clapham’s downloadable response toscripturacontinua, a performance series curated by Katharine Fry in March 2010 featuring new work by artists Francis Elliott, Sheila Ghelani, Jordan McKenzie and Helen Schoene

Scriptura Continua refers to the writing of late antiquity in which no inter-word spacing or punctuation was used, with no distinction between cases. As such, the task of interpreting the text fell to the reader, forced to divide the written string of letters into words. Reading aloud, meaning was only recovered through oralisation as the texts were recited over and over again.

The resulting WORK, HARD, TRY: A (W)reading by Rachel Lois Clapham links the productive literary constraint and historical practice of Scriptura Continua to a contemporary notion of writing performance. The publication takes the form of a basic downloadable PDF template and usesscripturacontinua’s open invitation to solicit future acts of reading, writing and performance.

Rachel Lois Clapham is Co-Director of Open Dialogues; a UK based collaboration that produces critical writing on and as performance.

Rachel Lois Clapham A (W)reading PDF download