Adam Knight

This project-led research MPhil degree investigates modalities of voice as used within art-writing in a process of ‘witnessing’ architecture through two spatial and temporal sites: what I refer to as former East and current West. The research identifies and proposes a collection of methodologies for exploring writing-as-practice: voice, desire-lines and turnings. The voice acts as an accumulative method encompassing work from a survey of contemporary art-writers organised around Mladen Dolar’s seven typologies of inner speech. Voice recognises both oral and written mnemonic practices. Desire-lines seek to tether fragmentary parts of a project-led practice whilst enabling peripatetic traces with, through and for architectural sites of representation. Turnings, derived from the German word Wende; signifies a tangential movement from discernable writing strategies toward the special conditions of practice-based research as situated in a relationship with methods and outputs. Findings have been deployed in four distinct practice-based (and textually-led) outputs: a publication, an installation, a broadcast and finally a film. Each output responds to two distinct collaborative art-projects: Cultural Monuments of GDR History (with Simone Bogner) and Desert Sessions (with art collective Trackingshot).