A Crowded Room

For almost a century now, Virginia Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own (1929) has offered a powerful meditation on authorship, directed at someone who is read by the world—who finds a voice within it—as a female subject: someone historically destined to venture surreptitiously into the uncertain space of creation, someone whose place at a desk or in the studio was never granted in advance.

We shall call this someone a woman, although “woman,” here, is simply the name we give to a subject affected by the long-standing historical complex of social circumstances that has made it less easy for certain bodies to close a door, to be unavailable to the world for a while, to inhabit with no guilt the pleasurable idleness and inspired solitude in which creation may occur. Or at least, someone less likely to consistently exercise the “sheer egoism” that, according to George Orwell, is an essential quality for an artist. Sheer egoism, inspired solitude—this is the grammar of authorship we have inherited from centuries of male writers. Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own issues a direct challenge to this closed model of creation, insisting that “masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”[i]

We have evoked A Room of One’s Own with our pens in the moments that we have dared to put our thoughts in writing or ink onto paper; to put creation at the center of our labors, closing the door and dedicating ourselves to production in whatever form it ends up taking. And yet the reality has often been that acts of creation have happened not in a room of one’s own, but rather in a condition of crowded solitude.

Indeed, if we look, we find creative labor to be intertwined with the mess of life itself: broken relationships, broken languages, broken pipes in the bathroom; precarious jobs and rent to be paid; pregnancies to be avoided, the upheaval of the arrival of a child, miscarriages one needs to carry to term, then purge from one’s body; things to be washed and washed again; struggles to find “a room of one’s own,” as if we humans had a right to solitude. The labor of creation, in other words, has never been separate from the continuous attending to the impossible demands that life makes of everyone, let alone women, who have historically happened to bear the heaviest burden within patriarchal societies.

If Woolf’s argument deals primarily with authorship’s specific material conditions—in order to write, a woman needs money and a room with a lock on its door—she also suggests throughout that authorship should by no means be the product of “a damned egotistical self.”[ii] Taking seriously her invitation means questioning whether a room of one’s own is still an appropriate image for the experience of authorship in the current moment, let alone one we want to pass on to the future. What if the very capacity to write from within crowded rooms was in fact not a predicament but a resource for thinking authorship alongside, and in a tender entanglement with, the burdens and delights of social reproduction? What if it is in a crowded room, rather than in a room of one’s own, that we decide that authorship is more livable, more porous, more like the life we want to have and bring about in our work?

Maybe some creative labors have been sustained by acts of others: looking over the translation of texts; lending us a computer when ours had broken minutes before a deadline; allowing us to sleep in their flat when we were in need of housing; preparing us breakfast after a night of work; buying us paracetamol when we are feeling sick; agreeing to help transport an object from one place to another as informal couriers. These labors have been interrupted and informed by knocks at the door; by friends’ comments or complaints; by little noises, both familiar and strange. They have become entangled with the reproduction of a world, which has affected us and was affected by us in turn.

I imagine this embodied experience of authorship somehow nesting within Vlatka’s studio: the place in which she first plotted the contours of the room she will take as her own in Venice for the Biennale. Even within that solitude, she could not help but wish to bring inside all the burdens and the delights, the wonder and the fatigue of living and working in crowded rooms. More than that: she decided to build a room that is crowded not only with work by her friends and colleagues, but also with their gestures of proximity at a distance. This creative interweaving of relations is the very substance of Vlatka’s authorial gesture.

Authorship acquires a different aspect if thought in relation to its hidden, yet vital, etymological link to the verb augere, which means to augment, to increase. Increasing is not quite the same as reproducing. It describes an enhancing of, an adding to the world. It could also mean making space, through creative practice, for the world’s plural imagination of itself. The image of a crowded room is not just a representation of the conditions in which creative practices take place. It is also a reminder that the places in which authorship can be exercised—for a woman, for someone who has no room to sit in—are very often not cordoned-off spaces but human environments. The crowded room is the suggestion that one may dare to think of oneself as an author even when there is no room to rely upon, let alone a lock to secure one’s autonomous creative time.

When I think of the crowded room as a possible horizon for the territory of authorship, I think of a sixteen-year-old girl in a hijab and a long dress decorated with flowers. She is standing in the dust of a camp beside white tents and a line of clothes hung to dry. She is called Nour Alnaji. She appears on the screen of my phone, but she is in Gaza. She has been displaced from her house and managed to bring only her notebooks with her, abandoning most of her books. Every day, she reads her poetry and she sings, recording and broadcasting herself to the world. She describes her struggle to be a writer in a moment when her people are being exterminated, when all the rooms she had once dreamt of inhabiting have been destroyed. She reaches me in a crowded digital room. She is not within reach. Yet I wonder whether it is the crowded room of which I am part, following her from afar, that makes it possible for her to keep daring to be an author, even amid all this death and destruction. Her capacity to write on the ruins makes me wonder whether we still need locks for our doors. Maybe, instead, we should recognize the possibility of authorship as a technology for increasing the world: transforming ourselves into chambers of resonances for the crowds that surround us.

[i] Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Hogarth Press, 1935), 97.

[ii] Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (New York: Harvest Books, Harcourt, 1973), 23.

Giulia Palladini is a writer and critical theorist. Her work moves between different languages and fields of knowledge, exploring practices of production and reproduction in art and social life. She writes about pleasure and labor, domestics and politics, archives and political resistance. She is an Alexander von Humboldt alumna, worked as Senior Lecturer at the University of Roehampton in London, and at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee in Germany. She has presented her work in various international contexts, and was Visiting Professor at the National University of Colombia, the University of Cuenca, Bern University of the Arts. She has collaborated in critical and artistic projects with various artists, including Mapa Teatro, Tara Irani, and Forced Entertainment. She is the author of The Scene of Foreplay: Theater, Labor and Leisure in 1960s New York (Northwestern University Press, 2017) and co-editor (with Marco Pustianaz) of Lexicon for an Affective Archive (Intellect, 2017). In 2021, she led the international research cluster “Feminismos Antipatriarcales and Poetic Disobedience.” In 2024, she will curate “Antidotes: encounters to think live arts in the political landscape” at Centro de Cultura Digital in Mexico City and “Rumbos de vida,” as part of “Stills of Peace” at the Fondazione Aria, in Atri, Italy.