Moosje M Goosen

Moosje M. Goosen lives and works in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. She is a writer and PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. Goosen has contributed as an art critic to magazines such as Frieze, Metropolis M and Ixiptla, and also writes fiction and essays in the framework of art exhibitions and events. She has worked in different educational capacities, teaching and mentoring art students (a.o. Sandberg Instituut/School of Missing Studies, Rietveld Academie, Piet Zwart Institute); coordinating the courses of De Appel Curatorial Programme (2011-2013) and the MA Fine Art of the Piet Zwart Institute (2009-2010), co-organizing and participating in academic conferences, and guest teaching university seminars.

In her PhD research (work title: Learning to Live with Ghosts) Goosen poses the age-old question, How to live? She looks at fiction writing as an exploration of the bodily and the influence of this imagined (literary) body on the discursive formation of disorders, diseases, and other pathologies. In her dissertation she argues for a different way of getting to knowledge that includes the effect of bodies on writing, and writing on bodies. Her PhD is therefore also a critique of the so-called objective academic text written by the scholar that theorizes without his/her body; the kind of writing that “ghosts” life in the making of knowledge. Her research and interest into 'body writing' has extended into autobiographical writing after a period of serious illness and a double lung transplant in 2017.