Choreolinguistic Salon 2025 is part of a series of gatherings intended to rehearse collective fabulation practices. It is committed to experimental historiographic reflection and reimaginations of freedom and failure, in terms that refuse the coloniality of Western humanism. As a space meant for situated informal study, it prompts multisensorial listening to the terms in which one studies, reads, writes, tells, translates, moves, negotiates, (dis)assembles, re-members. In this frame, ‘terms’ refer both to wording matters — discursive devices like grammars, vocabularies, etymologies, poetics and all manners of figures of speech — and to the very infrastructures at hand: the living-working conditions they enable. Addressing the whereabouts of reading, writing, archiving and storytelling — the body-corpus of knowledge — as an extended choreographic field, a body-field of reverberation across ghostly things and matters, the Salon welcomes forms of training attendance to convoluted grounds of contact and conversation, as well as quirky citational practices and modes of mouthing, sounding and resonating amid bodies close and far, in an attempt to encounter language(s) and knowledge(s) otherwise; rehearse other rhythms of acknowledgement, (un)knowing and (un)owning. An attempt to chart counter epistemologies, ways of grooving with many, to reimagine forms of political species beyond value extraction.
In 2025 Choreolinguistic Salon invites Olivier Marboeuf and Shivangi Mariam Raj, who propose two workshops:
Mapping negotiated spaces for communities to come – Olivier Marboeuf.
During this workshop, participants will be invited to assemble the minimal conditions of a place for their lives and their artistic and research practices in the form of mental maps drawn on the floor. They will then learn to negotiate the space and relationships between the different worlds they have drawn, developing zones of contact and relationship, of negotiation and circulation in space, involving historical, poetic or personal narratives, choreographic movements and ghosts, songs and sounds, mental images, texts and their translations; all of which will be ways of thickening the space by archives of the body and confronting the difficulties of making it exist in conversation. The aim of this workshop is to explore and rehearse the different strata of time in a politics of presence, the different strata of imagination, fear and desire, sometimes hidden or repressed, that secretly disturb the material conditions of a shared place and affect the construction of a community to come.
Assembling Poetry as Nonwitness – Shivangi Mariam Raj.
Language is always a performance of maintaining thresholds, but in this infinite catastrophe, what happens when all thresholds break? Multiple grades of genocidal violence are rehearsed in language and it is in language that they are simultaneously obfuscated. As on our homes and homelands, the settler-colonial present has laid siege on our vocabularies — our throats are parched, our voice is hoarse, our speech is shattered. This workshop steers us towards the site of the negative that poetry generates, with eclipse as methodology and strategy to reclaim our brokenness. Thinking with the literary device of synecdoche and deploying line breaks as our tool, we will develop a cumulative text with a language that grapples with its own failure, a language that is obscure to the perpetrators, a language that does away with the need to insist on evidence and rather works to restore the link between meaning and mourning, between the world of the living and the world of the dead. We will draw from an ethic of darkness that poetry gestures towards and build counterarchival densities to honour absence and practice refusal. We aim to develop our own secret subterraneous lexicon to retrieve our speech from the rubble of this hour.
On 13 September, 18h, Olivier Marboeuf gives a public talk at Espaço Parasita, as part of the Opening session of CICATRIZ — ESCOLA TERRA BATIDA, in coproduction with Choreolinguistic Salon.
On 19 September, 18h, Shivangi Mariam Raj gives a public talk at Casa do Comum, the Closing session of Choreolinguistic Salon.
Date: 13 to 19 September 2025
Venue: A Comuna – Research Theatre / Espaço Parasita / Casa do Comum
Organisers: Paula Caspão and Carlos Oliveira
Registration for the workshops is open until 6 July.
The language used is English.
