Jamigraphy: Writing as rhythm, movement and embodiment

Join artist and writer Alice Mazzilli and Cambridge Research Professor Pippa Steele for a jamigraphy workshop, exploring the rhythm of writing in response to live soundscapes.

Jamigraphy (jamming + graphia) emerged as a way of exploring how writing functions in relation to music. It brings together writers, musicians and audiences in a shared improvisational field. The process resembles a musical jam: each participant contributes gestures, rhythms and sounds, responding to one another in real time. Jamigraphy is about coordinating attention – about listening and responding to the changing energetic conditions of the space. The mark, the rhythm, the breath and the line all become extensions of the same field.

Each participant senses not only their own movement but also the energy of the collective body, the resonances that emerge as gestures overlap and interact. The wall, the floor or the canvas is no longer a passive surface; it becomes an active environment, shaping and being shaped by what unfolds upon it.

To write is to stand in relation – to time, to place, to others, to oneself. The aim of the jamigraphy workshop is to look for a reorientation: away from writing as just communication, just a system of signs, and towards writing as a lived event – as gesture, as encounter, as rhythm. This reorientation reveals a simple idea: that writing is not something we have; it is something we do. And in doing it, we inhabit the world differently. We move through it not as detached observers, but as sensing, affecting, responsive bodies. Jamigraphy invites us to unlearn some of the habits we’ve inherited – about clarity, utility, legibility, authorship. It asks: what if writing is not only for conveying information, but also for holding space? What if it is not only about leaving a trace, but also about making time for presence?

The workshop is part of a larger research-based art practice developed by writer-artist Alice Mazzilli called Interowriting, which is focused on writing as both a cognitive and a corporeal act, and draws on phenomenology and non-Western conceptions of script. It is co-hosted by the VIEWS (Visual Interactions in Early Writing Systems) project headed by Pippa Steele, who works on theoretical approaches to writing as a visual phenomenon and practice.