The Paper Roll Actions: Collective Writing and Reading as Performative Research

Our artistic research explores the possibility of constructing a collective voice through performative situations where writing and reading unfold on long rolls of paper that circulate among participants. These actions invite bodies to share words—passing the paper from hand to hand, unrolling and voicing them together—so that words become gestures, sounds, and moments of encounter that engage all the senses, not only sight.
This practice has developed in Argentina. Our actions work at the intersection of art and activism, seeking to affirm collective presence and shared imagination as forms of resistance and care.
The texts on these rolls are often composed from fragments of feminist writings that we reorganize, rewrite, or combine with our own words. Each performance produces a new constellation of meanings: the order of phrases changes, voices overlap or diverge, and the reading becomes a polyphonic event. Through this constant reconfiguration, words reveal their temporal and relational nature.
Rather than asking what words represent, our inquiry focuses on what words do when they move between bodies—when they are spoken, touched, or heard collectively. The act of writing and reading together transforms solitary gestures into shared breath and rhythm.
In these actions, words are not a fixed text but a living material that vibrates between bodies, generating resonance, intimacy, and dissidence. The emergence of a collective voice is both the method and the question of our artistic research: how can we think and feel together through the performative acts of writing, reading, and listening?