Vivian Abenchuchan Cano

VIVIAN ABENSHUSHAN is an interdisciplinary writer. Her practice, both individual and collective, explores micropolitical strategies that challenge the processes of contemporary capitalism and its cultural production structures, as well as the relationships between art and pedagogy, collaborative processes, feminist networks, and experimental writing practices.

What happens to bodies when they gather to write together? What does it mean to write with others, beside others, in the midst of a crowd? What kind of relationship is built between a collaborative writing process and a political counter-pedagogy? Can collective writing also be an art of organizing life in common? These are some of the questions that have sustained her artistic and pedagogical research for the past twenty years.

She has published the books El clan de los insomnes (Gilberto Owen Prize 2002), Una habitación desordenada, and Escritos para desocupados, published by Surplus under a copyleft license, among others. Her most recent book, Permanente Obra Negra (Sexto Piso, 2019), is a conceptual writing project based on copying, rewriting, and montage of quotes. It circulates as a book, a file, and a die-cut piece, in addition to having an online interface: permanenteobranegra.cc. She is the co-founder of the cooperative Tumbona Ediciones and director of BLA: Espacio de Experimentación Escrita.

In 2024, she published Exiliados del tiempo lento with No Libros, an independent publishing house in Barcelona.

Vivian will be in residence at Can Serrat from January to February 2025.