Sensing poetic sense-making. Exploring Catalan contemporary poetry through an artistic research dispositive

Although spoken by approximately 10 million people, Catalan is a minoritized language. Similarly, poetry is an endangered conceptual world. Catalan poetry, thus, is a threatened form of “knowing-in-connection” (De Jaegher 2019) that expresses a relationship of “precariousness” understood as mutual dependency (Di Paolo 2005, 2008).

This proposal consists in developing a collective and experimental methodology in form of artistic research dispositives for investigating Catalan contemporary poetry. This methodology will be tested here in a experimental laboratory.

The dispositive, conceived for non-Catalan speakers, invites to face a form of radical otherness by inhabiting a linguistic sphere whose meaning is not (directly) accessible. It offers conditions for exploring signlessness within a sign-based medium—as poetry does—by focusing on the emergence of sense rather than on consolidated meanings. It enables to collectively sense the flow of sense co-constituted by the interaction of sensitive listening bodies.

The dispositive consists in an empty space in twilight, including only few loudspeakers, in which a score will be voiced to facilitate the performance of four varieties of action. First, the participant co-researchers will be invited to move in ways that establish and sustained patterns of “interactional coordination” and thus enable “participatory sense-making” (De Jaegher and Di Palo 2007). Then, they will be asked to listen to organized fragments of pre-recorded Catalan contemporary poetry, focussing on the aural-sensitive dimension. Thereafter, the co-researchers will be request to write spontaneously poetic fragments in the languages of their choice. These practices of writing will be understood as forms of “reflective notation” (Arteaga 2025) of the emerging sense, and, furthermore, as processes of collective sensitive translation. Then, the participants will be invited to share their poetic findings by voicing them.