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As part of Konstepidemin fredag (Epidemifredag), writer and artist Ljiljana Maletin Vojvodić presented Silent Reading Workshop at Guest Studio 3 at Konstepidemin in Gothenburg. The participatory format was based on the experience of reading together in silence. The workshop brought together Swedish and American artists who live and work in Gothenburg, as well as artists who were staying or working in the city at the time.

Conceived as a simple situation with minimal instructions, the workshop invited participants to put away their mobile phones, choose a book, and spend thirty minutes reading individually within a shared space. Participants could bring a book of their own or choose from the available selection, with books read in both Swedish and English. From 7 to 7:30 pm, Studio 3 was transformed into a temporary space for concentration, silence, and a slower experience of time.

Starting from the understanding that reading is traditionally associated with private and individual space, the workshop shifted the act of reading into the realm of public and collective experience. At the same time, it preserved the individual nature of the reading act: each participant retained their own text, rhythm, and way of reading. Collectivity was therefore not established through direct communication, but through the simultaneous presence of multiple individual activities.

Silent Reading Workshop can be situated within contemporary artistic and curatorial practices that examine regimes of attention, productivity, and the use of time. Rather than producing new content, the workshop introduced a temporary interruption of dominant patterns of digital communication and continuous stimulation. Reading became a method of slowing down, focusing attention, and establishing a different relationship to time and space.

The format also raises questions about the status of reading as a cultural and artistic practice. By moving the experience of reading into a gallery/studio context, a private activity becomes a public event, while the act of reading itself becomes an object of observation and shared experience. The workshop did not require participants to interpret what they were reading or verbalise their experience, thereby moving away from the conventional structure of the art event, which is often centred on the production and exchange of discourse.

Although discussion was not an obligatory part of the workshop, the collective reading was followed by a conversation about contemporary reading habits, changing relationships to books and concentration, and the declining interest in reading among younger generations. The discussion also opened up broader educational and social questions: how adults talk about children’s and young people’s reading habits, what models of reading they themselves produce, and the role played by families, schools, and the wider cultural context in shaping those habits.

In this sense, Silent Reading Workshop operates as a participatory artistic situation that brings together reading, spatial practice, and an exploration of contemporary regimes of attention. Its simple structure allows an everyday activity such as reading to be reconsidered outside its conventional private context and placed in relation to contemporary questions of time, concentration, digitalisation, and the collective use of space.