Moosje M Goosen

schrijven, Literair, Artistiek onderzoek

I am a writer and artistic researcher living and working in Rotterdam. Since 2013, when I was diagnosed with a progressive lung disease that eventually led to a bilateral lung transplant in 2017, my relation to work has changed. With the ongoing care for my body and donor lungs, and a post-transplant, unpredictable health condition always drawing me back to what matters here and now, I have become more ambivalent towards defining myself in terms of work. Writing and reading are my daily practices and I do them both with and without the idea of “work” on my mind. Writing is my response to the raw texture of life and ill-being. It is my primary way of thinking—whether analytically (e.g. in my PhD dissertation, Learning to Live With Ghosts, 2023) or in more experimental forms of prose and poetry. I consider what I do to be most productive between disciplines; between literature and art; between genres of writing; between discourses and between academic and artistic research. Most generally speaking, I am interested in the many lives of language and narrative: the “spark of being”—to borrow the words of Mary Shelley—animated by writing.

**Before I was alive I was a stone (2024)** - Pamphlet published by Short Pieces That Move. "Before I was alive..." is a universal, very short story about the very long life of a stone. Cover drawing by Mariana Castillo Deball.

**The Mountain, The Mountain (2024)** - The Mountain, The Mountain is part of the 2024 program "The Sphinx's Riddle" of Manifold Books in Amsterdam. It is a text growing in time, based on my reading of The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann while recovering from a three-month hospitalisation, after having contracted COVID-19 in December 2023. The text is written in bits and pieces on postcards of Swiss mountains, sent to the space of Manifold Books over the course of several months, leaving a trace of the process of memory, recovery, and what can't be recovered after an intense period of illness.

**and so on books** - and so on books is a continuously changing collection of books, many of them for sale, most of them by women writers, poets, artists, and activists of 20th century. On Instagram, at the and so on studio (at Het Wilde Weten, open on Fridays and by appointment), and occasionally popping up in other places, and so on books is a space for the discovery and rediscovery of good old books and extraordinary writing. IG @and_so_on_books

LIFE CYCLE (2023) — **LIFE CYCLE. (As told by Peter). 2023. video, 3.23 min.** - Commissioned by The Science Gallery, EMC Rotterdam. (text: your life is about to end or start all over again / that’s what happens / your life is about to start or end / your heart will leave you / it is it tired / it will only have to beat a couple more hours / and then its job is done / at this moment / your heart is on its way / it’s in a box / it’s cold / it’s not beating / you are now waiting / waiting / and when this heart comes / into your body / and they have stitched it together / they will open up the clamps and the blood starts to flow in your heart / and because it’s warm the heart will start beating by itself / you are not here / you are not even existing at the moment / and now the doctors will try to bring you out of sedation / they will try to bring you / back / and you will now start to feel your heart / you will actually hear it beat / every beat you will hear / every beat is there / the beat / the off-beat / and slowly you will regain consciousness / and you perceive life / it seems to be new but it’s also old / strange / life / you could say / is only half the story)

On Wards. Text installation (2020 - 2023) — **On Wards. Text installation.** - A woman who has undergone surgery lies in a hospital bed marking time with thoughts about life. Talking with or to someone who is and isn’t herself, On Wards is a conversation that takes place in an ICU where voices are both sound and unsound, inside and out. Text installation, various formats. This work has been shown in different manifestations at Daily Practice, Rotterdam (2020); Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam (2021-2023), and Bureaucracy Studies, Lausanne (2023).

**In the beginning were the dinosaurs (2011). Uqbar Foundation and Casa Vecina, Mexico DF.** - “In the beginning were the dinosaurs” (2011) was developed as part of the project “Un Ojo Dos Ojos Très Ojos” by the Uqbar Foundation (Mariana Castillo Deball and Irene Kopelman), on invitation by Casa Vecina, an art space in Mexico City. In the evolution of stories passed on from generation to generation, cultures migrate, their territories shift, and cultural repertoires change. In this long line of storytelling, surprise and accident count more than reason. For the project, “Un Ojo Dos Ojos Très Ojos,” which takes its title from the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tale, One Eye, Two Eyes, Three Eyes, Mariana Castillo Deball and Irene Kopelman invited a number of artists and writers to each spend a month at the artist residency of Casa Vecina in the historic centre of Mexico City, and to develop new work based on the immaterial and lived heritage of stories. "In the beginning...." which was exhibited in a group show at Casa Vecina (Mexico DF) consisted of a home-fabricated collection of clay dinosaurs, reproductions of the clay figurines housed at the Waldemar Julsrud Museum in Acámbaro, Mexico; photos taken from the collection at the Waldemar Julsrud Museum; and a hand-out pamphlet with an essay reflecting on the history of the Acámbaro figurines and on processes of making and writing.

**The Museum of Western Folklore - text and reading performance** - The Museum of Western Folklore is a text written for 24 Ethnographic Objects, an artist publication by Sara Sejin Chang (Van der Heide), which was also developed into a reading performance in collaboration with Chang and performed at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam ("Art History" narrated by Mark Bellamy, October 7, 2012). With The Museum of Western Folklore I set out to write a text that literally confuses memory with colonial practices. For this I made use of the history of the sixteenth-century Italian Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci, as told by Jonathan D. Spence in The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci. In his study, Spence suggests that, through the technique of constructing mental memory palaces—a mnemonic exercise introduced by Ricci in China—the priest literally colonised the minds of influential Chinese people, planting crosses in their memories, thus paving a mental spiritual spark or path for the further spread of Christianity in China. The text was accompanied by Chang's work "Art History", a slide projection of red, black and white abstract drawings that evoke visual associations with images of modernism, abstract expressionism, so-called "primitive art", applied arts, and feminism.

**Phd Learning to Live with Ghosts. The Practice of Research.** - This research engages with the age-old existential questions that have preoccupied philosophy from its beginning: How to live? How to die? In dialogue with, first and foremost, the work of Jacques Derrida, I attempt to describe the tension that arises when, becoming ill, these general questions become particular and come to matter personally. Parallel to this research, I was diagnosed with an incurable auto-immune disorder, which required me to prepare for death, or a lung transplant—which I received in 2017. How to continue practicing philosophical thought while ill, when the body is foregrounded by continuous practical concerns? Using a phenomenological approach and deviating from the norms and conventions of academic discourse, this research makes a hauntological intervention into philosophy, from its spectral margins; from my sick-bed. As such, it looks at what thinking as a practice and experience entails, and under what conditions it is made possible. With texts by Virginia Woolf, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Annie Ernaux, M. NourbeSe Philip, and others, it argues for the presence of literature and poetry in and as philosophical thinking—as an alternative method to engage in the questions of life (and death), always as lived experiences, rather than as object of knowledge.

Pamphlet Launch: Before I was alive I was a stone

Datum: 13-06-2024 t/m 13-06-2024

Locatie: Short Pieces That Move

launch and reading on the occasion of the pamphlet publication "Before I was alive I was a stone"

https://readymag.website/u3104844720/4160594/

Generous Bodies Generous Minds

Datum: 25-01-2024 t/m 05-04-2024

Locatie: Science Gallery Rotterdam, Erasmus MC

In samenwerking met: Science Gallery Rotterdam, De Doelen

exhibition organized by Science Gallery curators Rawad Baaklini and Tess de Ruiter at the passage of the Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, with works by Pragya Jain, Moosje M Goosen, Marleine van der Werf, and Liza Wolters

The Mountain, The Mountain

Datum: 01-01-2024 t/m 31-12-2024

Locatie: Manifold Books

The Sphinx's Riddle, the 2024 program of Manifold Books features contributions by Moosje Moti Goosen, Natalia Papaeva, Katja Mater, Dagmar Bosma and the Paul Hoecker Research Group. The theme of mourning and transformation is approached from a multitude of perspectives, such as mourning surrounding life and death, medical gatekeeping, the loss of one's mother tongue and forgotten queer histories.

https://manifoldbooks.nl/