Forum Lectures #19: Nils Olsson & Imri Sandström

Writing/thinking/reading in the company 

In this duo lecture the collaborative dimensions of artistic as well as academic practices are explored in both content and form. Nils Olsson and Imri Sandström are invited to individually present and jointly engage their practice-based and literary research on the communal aspects of writing, thinking, and reading.

In his contribution, Nils Olsson will explore the figure of e: e. signifies edit, editor, editoriality. e. signifies to collect, modify and distribute. e. signifies a figure who gives new meaning to what is already at hand. e. signifies a function often diminished by being called author. Editoriality is a perspective that reactivates historical works, rewrites signatures, broadens contexts, and reveals hidden parts of the machines of cultural production. It is also a perspective that can make visible the material, economic and geopolitical conditions of our everyday engagement with words, images and sounds. In this sense, "editorial thinking" can be an instrument for identifying inequalities; while "editorial practice" entails production models of sharing and collectivity.

Imri Sandström, in her contribution, will share work from her ongoing artistic research:

Writing Visual Relations is an inquiry into the possibilities of writing about visual art, through the literary mode of ekphrastic writing. Within the project, the report is considered an inevitably both shared and sprawling activity, where the agency of texts and images, as well as media and materials, is key. This talk proposes ekphrasis as a riddling within an already transmedial visual and verbal time-space. Through the poem “What R-d Rose,” the notion of riddling is expanded together with Gertrude Stein’s famous line “a rose is a rose is a rose,” William Carlos Williams's poem “The Rewaking,” and Sara Ahmed’s performative paths. 

In bringing these two research practices together in the context of Art as Forum, we are interested in exploring the lecture format as a relational situation, also gesturing towards the audience to join us in exploring the symmetries and the frictions of the encounter.

About Nils Olsson & Imri Sandström

Nils Olsson (PhD Comparative Literature, U. Gothenburg, 2010) is a Senior Lecturer in Literary Composition at HDK-Valand, and the Dept. of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion, both at U. Gothenburg. He is on the editorial board of the journal OEI and has a long affiliation with the journal Glänta. In 2020 he co-edited and contributed to ”Writing with light. On literature and photography” (Makadam). His recent book r. (”e.”, Rojal, 2022) is one of several outcomes of a decade-long occupation with the notion of editoriality; so is the development of the BA programme in Editorial Practice (U. Gothenburg).

Imri Sandström is an artist, writer, and researcher. She works cross-disciplinarily with text, image, and sound, often concerning areas like history, language, and performativity. In 2019 she achieved her PhD in artistic research, within the field of literary composition. She runs the artistic research project Writing Visual Relations, at HDK-Valand, Gothenburg University.