2025 - 2026 FACTORY student led: Bodyword Gymnastics: What do your limbs say?

“My leg has a footnote! Grew like that

without asking! Better get it checked for cancer

No cancer, leg doctor said in chorus with

skin doctor, eye doctor. It’s a footnote, they sang, happy

happy! You’ll be better off now”

Zach Darsee, double uncle, or what to do about the wife

“I don’t think that anyone who’s a practicing poet, even a practicing bad poet, [...] would disagree with the fact that there is something from Outside”.  

Jack Spicer, lecture

“Foucault’s unbroken longing to record the sounds of these [convulsing] bodies, is always checked by his conviction that they occur at the very limit of language.”

Mark D. Jordan, Convulsing Bodies

Ella, Dar and Tomaso invite you to join them in the (hopefully) strangest writing experience of the year. As Jack Spicer used to say, poetry is dictated from without, but what if those voices of the ‘Outside’ were, in fact, dangerously close, coming from forgotten areas of our within? 

How would a novel written by our muscles, bones, guts or bacteria look like? What would happen to the structures of language if a poem was dictated to us by our neighbor’s feet and armpits? What if our voice came from the peripheries of our flesh? And, vice versa, can a book become an organism, a body, a machine or a plant?

By exploring the infinite possible correlations between somatic practices, drawing, writing and speaking, the factory aims to turn texts (poems, ideas for a novel, academic writing, notes and shopping lists) into living and breathing entities, creatures and ghosts, independent sources of meaning and knowledge, while we will follow the imagination of our organs and tissues, experimenting with their voices and languages.