Civic Soup Residency

Rhubaba Research Residents

Civic Soup are an interdisciplinary collective of designers, artists and spatial activists based out of Edinburgh since 2016. Across workshops, performances, live-builds and public art projects, their work invites an expanded sense of the public realm by means of co-operative thought and action.

For their residency with Rhubaba, Civic Soup are devising a broadened format of the "reading circle" to involve written and performative practices of reflection and reimagining. This will be realised in a workshop in May across a sequence of locations in Edinburgh.

What might the notion of place and our bodies as co-constitutive allow us to think– beyond the seemingly fixed markers, bounds and contracts of our environments? How might we then perform a re-writing of place, as a subversive and embodied act?

Following their last reading circle, ‘on place and decolonisation [2020]', this new series of gatherings will seek to augment our relationship to place by encountering recent philosophical and poetic ideas of inter-relationality between the body, material cultures and the urban realm. They will draw on strategies of fictioning, embodiment and deep listening to conjure alternate spatial imaginaries that might well impact the real.

Over the course of three days, the workshop will embed the selected texts within a framework of choreographic listening, writing and movement exercises. The texts and actions developed within the workshop will form the base materials for a performative outcome this coming autumn.

More info soon!