Gersande Hackpact

22.9.2022

Interview with Luca

Interviewee GI
Interviewer LUCA
Note-taking EMMA

L: what are you doing at the moment? currently working on a project
G: I’m picking up for the graduation project, the writing practice has been ongoing since last year. i see writing for my grad proj
The material aspect, bookbinding workshop, my colleagues have been producing tools to access to make books
It became a social project, to make people together, showing them they can make themselves, to create pantograph, developing different things, active in the social part not design I was thinking about producing a shelf
Shelf my mom found, one self-standing shelf, it’s more like a transportable shelf, to travel with books, it’s outstanding, that can keep a collection of books, want to prototype it but that ppl can customised, customed through the interaction

Where do I involve ppl? design, curator part, a lot of layers, design constraints, What I have it’s not accessible, find a more accessible design Public or individual use?
Public, I want to make workshop where ppl can reunite and do things together I’ve been interested in my role of mediator, facilitator and writer, writing down protocols and ethics, always collaboration with ppl that have different needs, I worked in it but never paid attention why it succeeded or failed? never been recorded

L: What’s the difference to public bookshelves that we already have?
G: The abstract of the shelf, similarity with facilitator that show a body of work, a small library, the street ones, unwanted books that get adopted, but I feel more like practically how to make a tool and see how much people can interact with it

L: It’s not about one shelf, but to make it fit everywhere?
G: Yes, I also want to record the process. Do I go to collectives, specific places to ask what is their ideal shelf? create something is needed
Organise workshop with the same tool and end with personalised ones
What’s the idea of shelf? and what books on them?

L: how do you plan how would you need a shelf? how would you mix it with your theoretical research?
G: I tend to be really big, if I have one project/platform focus is good

L: project documentation between your thesis?
G: Shelf research and thesis together, research to find better publishing environment, if you are deep into what you do you do more, compromise, exploration, that it’s not necessary
Because it’s always collaboration towards something, I want to scale it down to a shelf together /human scale
Building level, design, putting it outside? idk

L: thought the shelf as a publication tool? New-stands with a lot of things on? what’s the influence of publishing in your project?
G: for me publishing is beyond the book media or website, the abstract of the shelf has the potential itself, I relate with the shelf as a facilitator, a newspaper can always be revisited, you can change

L: it’s an intra-action, find something that fits so many fit at once.. News-stands, has this already been done?
G: work with traditional media and subvert it. Find old models and redesign them to current needs. No need to create new things all the time. The more conscious approach to thing

L: bigger fear? the killer?
G: insecure to not narrow it down. So many potential leads that it’s hard to choose one, not a final outcome, my work starts when it’s out there. Where people can be active. Bring able to bring that to people, if I have to hold/support it al the time it means I failed a bit. Should be readable by all, see whatever they want in it.
If it doesn’t talk to ppl, I failed. But if it does, whatever the way and the result it’s okay.

L: research topics?
G: this morning the text a lot about materiality (Johanna Drucker). Digital platforms as materials? plain text she sees as performative acts, not as finite products. Many layers, I need a case study to focus on, I love that publishing has become an active field, a lot of theory I read it’s still not something I relate with, there’s room for me to research, I already have a lot of material, literature, my main focus alongside I want to keep in my working experience, just this contact and experience I have with ppl with successes and failures. I want to make my research out of my experience, academic stuff can be a bit out of touch. It lacks a bit of practical sense sometimes.

L: how do you see yourself as the curator defining the size? or you put the curation of this to the user of the shelf?
if the shelf has limits, it’s limited physicality? if you look at public spaces you decide how much can fit and how?
G: I do not see myself as the one in control of the shelf. If I have to produce the shelf for the bb workshop, but bringing it somewhere else, it would be interesting to think about public shelf, outside of the private sphere.
Could also prototype a shelf that can work autonomously if that the way

L: interaction of ppl with the shelf?
G: I find interesting the potential bringing body of work everywhere. I don’t know what could be in it. Im excited to create a platform where ppl can say and think how to use it.

L: you’re the mediator for the possibility for the individualised shelf and put their media on?
G: I’m still unclear here. Could also make a series and give it to ppl and ask for documentation.
Shelf design based on what the person need but not making it but mediate the creation.
Would be nice if every writing stage has a different shelf

L: do you see yourself as an instructor? to be usable as a shelf? you need to instruct them?
G: I haven’t placed myself yet. Just asking ppl to use it? Im interested in

L: ppl might not make practical shelf that fit or estetically pleasing? maybe they can do it totally differently than what you thought?
G: you can’t have control on it. To be a good facilitator is a lot of planning ahead knowing what could happen.
Giving them materials, that can be assembled.

L: like Ikea but unclear instructions. They can use on their own
G: textual set of instruction and materials and see how they interpret it

L: personal but also business? two

All different leads, potential “shelf-making” need to be written and collected, archived

29.9.2022

1 What do you want to make?
2 How do you plan to make it?
3 What is your timetable?
4 Why do you want to make it?
5 Who can help you and how?
6 Relation to previous practice
7 Relation to a larger context
8 References/bibliography

1 I’d like to work on a series of book-supports and fictional patents narrating the social and material structures of those book-supports. This would lead to a series of social interventions and workshops, in which public or private participants would be invited and involved in some stages of the book-supports’ coming to perform with others.

/// I will create a series of narrations of them, describing a shelf as a social structure. Techniques, material and assembling will be adjusted according to the context of the shelf. The patent is used to tell the story of each particular book support. For instance bookshelves on the streets, public private blending. Or publishers identity reflected in shelves at expo's. Create/curate a space for people to occupy. Subverting patent into opening rather than closing off.

2 The first stage of this project would be to research privately the material and theoretical significance of book-supports, followed by their fictional potential. Then, this research will be brought in different public contexts, discussed and finally reflected upon in a final material and writing stage (maybe a book-support handbook or situation with assessments of all the different experiments). Protocol as outcome potentially, open ended.

3 In the first trimester I’d like to focus on my material and theoretical research on my own, trying to figure out what are the entry-points for others to join the research, experience it and, in the best case scenario, benefit from it. After the Christmas break, I will make a series of book-support intervention and/or workshop in which participants will be involved. In the last trimester I’d like to focus on the outcome of this series of interventions and/or workshops, gather informations into a sort of “Book-support Handbook” to assist/guide/encourage further interventions and/or workshops.

4 Fiction is for me a great path to re-imagine social structures and ways of working or being together. Through the material research and relationships made with human-structures and material-structures (working together as “an aim towards something”), I want to explore and investigate with others, ways of working together with more empathy, in circular circuits rather than linear ones. The workshop format (1), the craft methodologies/requirements and co-working/co-thinking environment, are fertile grounds for research around alternative or fluctuating publishing ways of being, take the authority out of the hierarchy and put it into site-specific community.

/// empowering for people to build and not be tied to 'the proper way', reclaiming spaces, making public spaces welcoming. Relation to guerilla gardening, graffiti, guerilla crochet and knitting, publishing as survival, circulating work without gatekeepers or absurd thresholds like galleries or bookshops.

6 My work is a crossover between curating and facilitating other’s work within my professional practice (workshop technician/educator (2), bookbinder, editor…) and my personal practice, that is always nested within collaborative publishing platforms (books, theatre, radio, workshops, …). The investigation and prototyping of publications as a context within which the “public” has agency, evolves and extends the publication has been a main interest in my work, each publishing stage seen as a moment of craft, from the conceptualisation stage, to the designing one, production to “publication” stage, that is not seen as an end, but an ongoing process, where one leave the agency to a new set of people. The past year I’ve been very interested in developing my writing practice, trying to more thoroughly trace and record the steps taken together, methods to enable those steps and my role as a facilitator. This “background” work has become an exercise and a work itself, becoming a way to publish in a self-reflective way, offering transparency to the social structures underlaying each project.

7 See 4.

(1) that is very similar to an educational environment where reciprocity is key, the workshop-manager assists and learns, from the workshop-guest, that challenges craft with different kind of material and conceptual needs

(2) as a workshop practitioner, I like to observe how crafts create context, how makers write fiction through objects, tell stories without words.