Unfixing the Atlas / reading-rooms

While creating Unfixing the Atlas last year, we described it as a piece, a space and a method for reading traces: traces we are born with and those we produce ourselves, visible, fleeting or hidden traces we find or remember in our (immediate) environment. Those could be a needle on the ground, a bird on the roof, a song in your ear, overwhelming or also barely noticeable mass media material, or even the other person next to you.

The public reading-rooms, currently prepared by the Unfixing the Atlas group for 2026, will allow visitors to attend and receive readings of traces, and, if they wish, offer readings of traces themselves.

At the core of the work’s collective research process we ask ourselves: Which traces invite us to be read and which are we inclined to read? And what exactly do our senses do when we read them for one another?

Last year, the group of practitioners (forming and evolving since summer 2022) created and presented a performance and an installation, supported by various Brussels partners. The premiere took place at KIOSK Gallery in Ghent.

History & Background

This year, those in the group who are interested and able to invest their time, are further developing their methods of reading traces and sharing those readings: some of us are more interested in exploring reading methods themselves. Others are drawn to deepen their understanding of a specific object or environment — evoking different perspectives of one and the same object through readings made by others. This is why the act of offering or requesting a reading became even more central in the meeting(s) with the audience than it was up until now.

In a world we understand as made up of traces, the ways we can read ourselves, the environment and (the) other/s seem infinite. While working we have found ourselves doing physical balancing acts, listening to our office, garden, or kitchen, dismantling machines and playing memory games, in moments of dance and collaborative list-making, …

The reading methods we've developed so far and are continuing to explore increasingly demonstrate their ability to decipher spaces and objects, as well as create new ones. Collectively and often performantively, whether intentionally or not, they interact with one another and surprise us with new imaginings.

^{[Unfixing the Atlas inscribes itself within the context of Disclosing Practices…: An open series of public presentations, performances, workshops, retreats and dialogues supporting artistic research practices to be uncovered, revisited, reconsidered, rediscovered, disrupted, reiterated, re-activated, shared, shown and understood anew in new contexts and through new practitioners.}

^{Disclosing Practice... is the continuation of Choreography as Conditioning, a collective process of "writing through practices" that resulted in a book series with the same name edited by Alex Arteaga and Heike Langsdorf. As a framework Disclosing Practice... finds facilitation and support by radical_hope.]}