To whom it may affect
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What does collectivity mean? What does collectivity do?
Which is the meaning to be found in collective approaches to publishing practices?
What are the different (mis)understandings of “acting collectively”, or “publishing collectively”? What are the forms into which collectiveness can transform?
Is there a collective understanding of collectivity?
Where does collectivity start, and where does it end? Does it ever start? Does it ever end?
Who does it include, and who does it exclude?
Does collectivity have an inside? Does it have an outside? Is publishing a border? A landmark? A cliff?
How is an audience positioned? How does an audience adopt a position?
What is an invitation? What is a host? What is collective responsibility?
How do we practice collective agency?
Where do we learn to act collectively? How do we train to act collectively?
The aim of this publication, rather than drafting answers, is to invite whomever these questions may affect to think along and take a position towards unresolved issues lingering above the un-demarcated field where collectives care to publish.
What follows is a corpus of four letters respectively addressed to Jeanne van Heeswijk, Erica Gargaglione, Carolina Castro and Chaiyoung Kim (Chae)—but also, to all of them at once and, ultimately, "to whom it may affect".
Each addressee is concerned with collective approaches whether their practice comprises rehearsing collectiveness, inspecting and documenting mechanics of self-organised cultural organisations, actually co-organising activities within a cultural organisation or more particularly questioning the effect of intimacy on publishing practices through experiments. At last, I would like to acknowledge all addressees for having played a consented or incidental role in the process and the publication of this epistolary chronicle.
Departing from a local issue—itself stemming from the context-specific process of a collective publication—these letters intend to give an account of recurring conflicts relating to collective processes.
The publishing of private missives both represents an invitation and a record of the relations involved in a process that is challenging to document or that may be overridden by its design. These series of epistles are punctuated with a collection of methods to practice collectiveness in publishing contexts. In turn, the suggested methods may be enacted and adapted to any collectivity.
This text originates from the desire to dislodge a classical decision-making process present in my practice of graphic design: an individual application of the discipline where the content, separately produced, is “locked in place” before “design” can take place. I have progressively lost interest in being assigned the unwanted responsibility of making aesthetic and structural choices arbitrarily (or upon my subjectivity) at a post-production stage of the workflow.
More recently and through an increasing practice of design in contexts where publishing is a process achieved collectively, I attempted, in different ways, to shift the design process from a post-production to a pre-production stage. These experiments resulted in what I identified as an intuitive persistence to design “open-systems” in place of “solutions”. Practically, I found myself dialoguing with collectivity through the design of “malleable” structures that demanded to be responded to.
Reversing the process of design, however, did not seem sufficient to prevent the division between content and container (the design in which the content is poured). Instead, I imagine sharing a form of curatorial agency with the intention of producing collective outcomes where content and design are mutually beneficial in that they permeate each other in the course of the process.
The aims carried by the practice of graphic design appeared to be discordant with the values upon which the process of publishing collectively operates, especially in that designing is often a means for experimenting within the collective process rather than the collective's goal (exaggeratedly speaking, a “good design”).
Graphic design, in the un-demarcated field of "independent publishing", may alternatively be introduced as a tool to facilitate collective processes: I am curious about the impact of a design operation happening elsewhere than at the post-production stage.