Writing Journeys
Writing Journeys
No. 1: A Room of One’s Own
No. 2: Parts Divided
No. 3: Messages from the Interior
Writing journeys are immersive multimedia art experiences that engage your senses to activate your inner voice and capture it in writing.
Using a series of prompts – some written, others sensory or somatic – you are guided inward and begin to write. The prompts are the bridge between your external and internal landscapes, enabling your writing to pull from both worlds.
Some prompts are written or auditory, drawing more upon language and coming from my own writing.
Other prompts are sensory or somatic to activate deeper places inside the body where story lives.
Some prompts come through scent or sound.
Some are visual or ask you to observe movement. Others ask you to enact your own.
Some produce a synesthetic-like effect, where a stimuli can invoke multiple senses and create an output that uses language but stretches beyond it.
Writing journeys help you to explore words as concepts, as the boxes we use to sort our world into, to color and codify our individual and shared “realities.”
They help expose the paradox of language: (1) its usefulness in helping us understand our inner and outer worlds by giving us a reference point and (2) how it can be a barrier to understanding due of its inability to include perception beyond the concept.
The box is useful. It is a container which lets us contain. But the nature of the box means it has walls – barriers that can be difficult to see beyond. The box is a powerful tool. Without the awareness of the box, the box, itself, morphs into the “reality.” But use the box with awareness and you have the ability both to contain and the power to see beyond.
Each writing journey guides you in gently from this boxed-in world, explodes perceived reality, and then gently releases you back out again, slightly rearranged.
A Room of One’s Own
Installation using audio, interactive visual components, and writing | English or Spanish
October 7-11, 2022 | The Factory | Todos Santos, Baja California Sur, México
Explore different corners of your solitude to discover new facets of the self that reside within.
As you move through various vantage points in physical space, new vantage points get activated in your interior. The self becomes the window, as you look from the outside in and from the inside out. How does where you place your inner observer alter what you perceive?
This writing journey explores perspective through the visual field, using concepts like color, scale, point of view, and the vanishing point to relate to your inner voice and capture it in writing.
Inception
A Room of One’s Own was originally created during a 2-month residency inside my friend César Perales’ painting studio, where we shared much time in conversation about our creative work. During the summer of 2022, we cleared the space, painted the walls white, then he gave me the keys, left for Spain, and left many visual breadcrumbs behind, which my writer’s brain followed and pieced together, anew. This was the inception of my first writing journey, which I ran for the final five days of my time there.
Writing Journeys have become the place where my worlds converge – a plane where I can play with words beyond the page. They are where I present my own writing and creative work and where I set the stage for you to move into yours.
Installation using audio, visual stimuli, somatics, and writing | English or Spanish
June 1-13, 2022 | Migrante Galería | Todos Santos, Baja California Sur, México
An immersive art experience through writing, by Amanda Aileen Fisher. In conversation with Tierra Prometida, a visual art exhibition by César Perales En español, el voz de actriz y escritora Daniela Villar. In english, the voice of Amanda Aileen Fisher. Writing by Amanda Aileen Fisher… and you.
Excerpt:
All of these things exhale. These beings breathe…
What do they speak?
What messages do they have for me?
It is not only their breath that moves through me, but their voices, too, winding around each of my fingers, which now move to write.
Parts Divided
A Writing Journey into all of your Inner Voices
Happening using audio, dance performance, movement and writing
November 26, 2022 | Casa de la Cultura, Barrio Antioquia (Trinidad) | Medellin, Colombia
Interpretive Dance: Andrea López, contemporary dancer, @andrealopez.salazar
Host: Proyecto Florecer disrupts cycles of poverty to create sustainable generational change through education and community service. www.proyectoflorecer.org
How many voices reside within? And if there are many, how to know which is the voice of the authentic self?
Parts Divided is a guided journey into those voices, giving them all space to speak and giving you the page which you use to listen.
This exploration helps you parse out which voices create movement within your own life and where those impulses originate. It helps you see more clearly: is your momentum your own or the combined force of others’?
This writing journey takes place in a group setting where you will receive a mix of written, auditory, visual, and somatic prompts that take you into your own writing. The experience includes simple movement, an interpretive dance performance set to writing, and a book-making exercise. We end the journey with a group discussion to help integrate the experience.
