Forestilling
Reading Room
Reading Room is a collaborative performance seen as materials in dialogue that grapples with the times we are living through, while holding on to our ability to imagine that other paths are possible. We are four artists who invite you to our “reading” and “re-readings”, and to join us in a conversation afterwards about generating collective strategies for living in our times.
This expanded piece integrates artistic research practices, including writing, performing, reading, movement, and analogue film, through an interwoven assemblage of personal and political histories that tap into strains of collective memory. Developed by Myna Trustram, Camilla Graff Junior, Luisa Greenfield, and Per Roar.
For over ten years, we have collaborated on developing the following themes. We began by looking at the Journal, which resulted in Are you still there? Four approaches to the journal (2013/2018). Followed by the question of Presence (2021), and the Archive, which became Living and Lasting (2022), and now, this third, about Reading.
Reading Room is a part of Per Roar’s engagement in the artistic research project MEMORYWORK. We began this process in Manchester in February 2025, while discussing what bearing witness can be as an act of resistance. As part of our workshop, we visited Chetham's Library, the first public reading room in North England, where Marx and Engels wrote their Communist Manifesto. We also visited the People’s History Museum, the national museum of democracy, which explores the radical stories of people coming together to champion ideas worth fighting for, such as the Matchgirls, whose strike in 1888 inspired a wave of collective organising among industrial workers in the UK and overseas.
BIOS
Luisa Greenfield is a Berlin-based visual artist working predominantly with analogue film and essay writing. She holds a PhD in Art and Media, and her most recent 16mm film works that she screens internationally, come from a close study of early film history. She is an active member of the LaborBerlin analogue film collective and is a frequent editor and essay contributor to books and journals on film and artistic research.
Camilla Graff Junior works’, as a performance artist and curator, are situated in the intersections between visual art, creative writing, ecofeminist theory, archive and affect. Her current project, WE, ANIMALS (2021 – present), draws from an archive of local and experienced knowledge developed through interaction with the Fjaltring-Trans area on the Danish West Coast, its citizens, animals, and plants. Over the last thirty years Camilla has conceived solo and collaborative works performed and received in residency in Europe, Africa, South America and the United States.
Per Roar works as a choreographer, performer, and artist-researcher. Drawing on his interdisciplinary background and concern for socio-political issues, he combines strategies from social research with somatic approaches to choreography, as seen in his doctorate, Docudancing Griefscapes (2015), from the University of the Arts Helsinki. He is a professor of choreography at KHIO and a co-leader of MEMORYWORK (2021-2024), an artistic research enquiry into the politics of remembrance and representation.
Myna Trustram worked in England for many years as a historian, museum curator and academic. In 2021 she stopped paid work and now works as a writer, mostly of short experimental essays in which she calls upon literary and academic forms to consider themes such as mourning, childhood, separation and emptiness.