Gladman’s lines are very much of the body as it extends the body’s syntax and grammar onto the page, filling it with crossings, cosmologies, topographies rather than legible, discernable language. In Prose Architectures, Gladman creates more than just writing or drawings-she creates dwelling places. But they resist figurative representation, instead creating richly imagined abstract spaces.īoth writing and drawing practices share a concern with the limits of language, an emphasis on documenting presentness (in thought and the body), and a preoccupation with architecture. The 100-plus drawings that follow evoke cityscapes and city shapes. Drawing was going into time it was pulling the process of thought apart, and what was most profound was that it left a record behind, a map: the drawing itself.' It produced a sense that thinking could and did happen outside of language: I saw it as a line extending from the body, through the hand, as if something were being poured or pulled out of oneself, but here, finally, because it is impossible to achieve this in writing, in time with thought rather than chasing thought through syntax, as something already over, a moment we can now only describe.

'Drawing extended my being in time it made things slow. Gladman beautifully uses the drawings as an extension of her writing process, as a way to free language from constraint.Įxcerpt from Prose Architectures introduction by Renee Gladman:

She has published prose works including Prose Architectures (2017), an interdisciplinary project investigating the continuum between sentences and drawings and Calamities (2016), her first collection of essays and the Ravicka novels, Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), and Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013).Ī year with Renee Gladman takes place in collaboration with the Schwules Museum, Berlin.A book of ink drawings that regards language as an exposed nervous system, uncovering the moment whereby architecture emerges out of prose, the sentence becomes a drawing, and the act of writing narrative can be examined from bodily movements. Gladman, whose work has been associated with the New Narrative movement, composes prose and poetry that explores the potential of the sentence with map-making precision and curiosity. KW Institute for Contemporary Art and the Schwules Museum in Berlin have initiated a collaborative venture for 2019 to support a writer-in-residence for one year, starting on January 1, 2019. The residency will complement both institutions’ program and explore the substantial archive at the Schwules Museum, which remains unaltered over the past decades and highlights the history and culture of LGBTIQ communities in Berlin. In 2019 KW’s residency format A Year with… will be held by American poet, novelist, artist, and publisher Renee Gladman (born 1971 in Atlanta, US).

Event Factory by Renee Gladman