Sluice magazine - Autumn 2020 by Sluice art

ARTIST-LED CULTURE

THE LIBRARY

AUTUMN/WINTER 2020

2 The Digital Archive of Artists Publishing

The Digital Archive of Artists Publishing (DAAP) is an interactive, user-driven, searchable database of Artists’ Books and publications, that acts as a hub to engage with others, built by artists, publishers, and a community of producers in contemporary Artists’ Publishing, developed via an ethically-driven design process and open-data methodology. DAAP is committed to challenging the politics of traditional archives that come from issues regarding inclusion and accessibility, from a post-colonial, critical gender and LGBTQI perspective. The project will work to ensure an equitable and ethical design process occurs throughout the archive development.

daap.network

3 Social Art Library

Social Art Library by Axis is a collectively-built archive and resource for and about social art practice. It holds a growing online collection of projects, writings and audio-visual media submitted by artists as well as an archive of current thinking around the intersections between art and society. Social Art Library also runs a digital programme of commissions and residencies. To browse the library, submit your work or apply for a commission, please visit the Social Art Library website.

socialartlibrary.org

Contents

Articles

Alphabetical order

Art of Change

Big Mobile Public Library Energy

Chapter 1: Dissent

Content Anxiety

Editorial

Library as Memorial

The Digital Archive of Artists Publishing

The Imperfect Librarian

The Somatic Library

The Universal Library

Authors

BEALE, Ruth

BUTLER-GALLIE, Clementine

CLARKE, Ami

DEVEREUX, Florence

ENGLAND, Karl

6, 70

FRANCIS, Susan

GENTRY, Alistair

HILL, Julie F

KATZ, Amanda Martin

POULTON, Duncan

Editorial

Publishing Director Karl England Associate Editor Ben Street Proof and sub-editor Tash Kahn Publisher Sluice Art Direction + Design Christian Küsters Barbara Nassisi info@chkdesign.com chkdesign.com Lettering All fonts by Colophon colophon-foundry.org Distribution Central Books centralbooks.com Contact editor@sluice.info sluice.info Subscriptions Subscribe online at sluice.info Cover Julie F Hill The Space Out of Time Dark River III & The Edge of Physics Acknowledgements Pauline England Unsolicited material cannot be returned, though all correspondence will be passed on to the editor. The views expressed in sluice are not necessarily those of the publishers ©2020 ISSN 2398-8398 EAN 9772398839005

Libraries. Libraries are distinct in that they span several commons, they are part of the Information Commons, they facilitate the Knowledge Commons and they increasingly occupy a position in the Digital Commons. For many their prime utility is as part of the Social Commons, a space in which to meet and partake in the Civil Commons. Libraries are sites of social production. The instinct to create order, to sift and file is paramount in this information age. But in an era of SaaS data harvesting with firms like Palantir and Cambridge Analytica the individuals’ relationship to public/private ownership, civil liberties, privacy and collectivity is rightly under intense focus. After 11 years of imposed austerity the unfolding fallout from Brexit and Covid is combining to further pummel the UK economy. In this reduced state local authorities are struggling to fulfil the bare minimum of their statutory obligations. In the UK municipal councils have a duty ‘to provide a comprehensive and efficient library service for all persons’. What this means on a local level is up to the discretion of each council. Since 2010 over 800 libraries have closed in the UK. Against this running-down of the social contract is a vital discussion around the purpose of libraries as seen from a personal and social point of view.

Karl England

This edition of the Sluice magazine is dedicated to those that use the idea of the library to map our relationship with the State, with capitalism and with each other.

Unauthorised copying, hiring or lending of this magazine is prohibited but ask us nicely and we’ll see what we can do. Sluice magazine is at all times a companion publication to a Sluice initiated project, whether our biennial, expo or simply a programme of associated events, as such the magazine, is positioned as a crucial document of record of art as Praxis. Sluice magazine is concerned with applied theory, we examine how the arts impact our societal and economic environment and vice versa. At Sluice we aim to publish writing that we perceive to have an unmistakable disruptive quality, which might open up traditional art discourse to unexpected ideas, approaches and methods. In this way, our contributors’ backgrounds are not important: we encourage contributions from any and all disciplines. At its best, Sluice magazine should be a site of artistic creation and theoretical reflection that creates confrontations, sparks, and unexpected alliances. Sluice is open to arguments from different (contextually-merited) ideological quarters. Sluice magazine is a forum for debate not an echo chamber of assumed rectitude.

In a digital environment where all knowledge is potentially available – the role of the librarian as a sifter, a curator, a gatekeeper of limitless information is crucial and of immense interest to artists. The Digital Commons has enabled everyone to become a librarian. Collating, curating and redistributing cultural and informational production. The Extended Mind thesis proposes our digital aids as extensions of our minds (with the interweb an example of extended cognition) in the same way as a prosthetic limb is an extension of one’s body. This suggests each individual as a walking library of Alexandria, limited solely by our personal cataloging abilities. The physical library has a utility, this is layered with the immaterial ideas swept up with the idea of the library – ideas of access, exclusion, inclusion, ownership, authority and narrative. Here we look at artists, collectives and independent initiatives tackling – tangentially or directly – these issues.

Julie F Hill

The Universal Library

Julie F Hill From Here to Infinity (detail) Mirror, book pages 2016

The Universal Library

Responding to the vastness of nature as represented by modern science, Julie F Hill’s work employs an expanded approach to photography and image-making, creating sculptural installations that explore conceptions of deepspace and cosmological time. In her practice, the universe offers a conceptual and perceptual limit to the human endeavour to know nature in its entirety – a pursuit in which we find monuments to information structures such as the library and archive.

Julie F Hill The Pillars of Creation physically manipulated print, aluminium, mirror 2016

Pulling inspiration from imaginary environments in film and literature, I frequently use mirror – a typically Borgesian device – for its potential to expand the possibilities of space and hint at other dimensions. Mirrors are a key motif in the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, where ‘[Human] knowledge comprises reflections of the universe received only through a mirror’. In an uncanny conflation of reality and fiction,mirrors are in fact the light-gathering component within reflective telescopes, gathering the light that forms many of our images of the heavens. Drawing from this dualism of science and fiction, the Pillars of Creation (Fig. 1) takes the renowned image of the M16 Eagle Nebula taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and reforms it into a sculptural installation with monolith-like mirrors. This sculptural configuration provides an imaginative experience of cosmic encounter, whilst alluding to the fallacies built into perception and the construction of knowledge.

Julie F Hill From Here to Infinity (detail) Mirror, book pages 2016

In From Here to Infinity, (Figs. 2–5) smallscale models made from a deconstructed book on astronomy combine into a vast floor installation. Each model invites the viewer to peer into potentially infinite spaces, and illusory corners of the universe. The physicality of the book page is offered up against the cold marble floor in various rolls, folds and crumples. The paradoxical reality that lies behind the image is revealed through an interplay with mirrors, prisms and lenses – as if some strange laboratory experiment has been undertaken.

Julie F Hill From Here to Infinity Book pages, mirror, lenses, prisms 2016

Julie F Hill From Here to Infinity (detail) Mirror, book pages 2016

Julie F Hill, Gauld Architecture Uncertain Ruins Mixed media installation 2019

In the site-specific installation Uncertain Ruins, a collaboration with Gauld Architecture, sculptures, video and photographic works responded to the context of Swiss Cottage Gallery, situated within the iconic Swiss Cottage Library. Artificial intelligence algorithms trained on astronomical datasets and related holdings from Swiss Cottage Library considered the library’s potential as a container for all knowledge. Scaffolding structures referenced software architectures that increasingly produce, organise and distribute knowledge. (Figs. 8–9)

As part of this installation, I drew directly from the library’s holdings in The Universe (which others call the Library), comprising of playfully positioned astronomy and physics books around the gallery floor. The title is taken from the first line of Borges’ short story The Library of Babel, which conceives the universe in the form of a vast library. The positioning of the work is suggestive of a media archaeology where books are relegated to the shadows, cast aside as relics of older technologies of wisdom.

Julie F Hill, Gauld Architecture Uncertain Ruins Mixed media installation 2019

Photos: Ben Blossom

The black reflective surface of high gloss acrylic was employed as a mirror, to deliberately reflect and complicate the wider context of Swiss Cottage Library, creating surreal and illusory moments where reality slips inside itself. Their blackness hints at interstellar space, but also to so-called technological ‘black boxes’ in machine learning and AI. These technologies demand vast quantities of data, as evidenced in Through Machine and Darkness, (Fig. 8) a video in which a parallel universe conjured by an AI trained on 45k+ images from the Hubble Space Telescope slowly unravels.

My ongoing research is looking at how the next generation of telescopes will produce unfathomable quantities of data, so much so, it will be impossible for humans to examine it. Therefore, astronomical datasets will increasingly be examined by AI and machine learning algorithms. Through assigning unsupervised machine learning/ computer vision tasks to astronomical datasets, tantalising questions are asked of the data. What will the computer see? What new features or phenomena, or even new physics could be presented for our attention? What are the implications for the future of knowledge? Perhaps as James Lovelock speculates in his recent book Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence, ‘the final objective of intelligent life is the transformation of the cosmos into information’.

Julie F Hill The Space Out of Time: Dark River III Physically manipulated archival pigment print, mirror, books 2019

Julie F Hill The Space Out of Time: Dark River III & The Edge of Physics Physically manipulated archival pigment print, mirror, book 2019

The image as dataset is further explored in my ongoing, iterative sculptural work Dark River that uses one of the largest datasets ever made of the Milky Way, produced by the ESO Vista Telescope, located in the Atacama Desert, Chile. In the Space Out of Time, a solo residency and exhibition at Terminal Creek Contemporary and the Capture Photography Festival (Vancouver, CA, 2019) the colossal print measuring 5 x 9 metres was manipulated into formations that mimicked lava flows from pre-existing cracks in the gallery floor. (Figs. 13–14) Mirrors again helped conjure up an otherworldly environment, throwing the viewer off balance into a scenario where the sky was literally brought down to Earth. Through the juxtaposition of technology and nature, the works attempt to extend consciousness of what constitutes nature. juliehill.co.uk

THE DIGITAL ARCHIVE OF ARTISTS PUBLISHING

Ami Clarke

The Digital Archive of Artists Publishing (DAAP) is an interactive, user-driven, searchable database of Artists’ books and publications, that acts as a hub to engage with others, built by a community of artists, publishers, and creative practitioners in contemporary artists publishing, via an ethically-driven design process, supported by Wikimedia UK and Arts Council England. The project is inspired by the site of Banner Repeater’s public Archive of Artists’ Publishing at Hackney Downs train station, with 11,000 people passing through a day, it serves as a response to the need for a similarly dynamic approach to archiving in an online context. Networked strategies underpin everything we do, pioneering a hybrid way of working in contemporary critical art practice through the strong symbiosis between precedents set via experiments in text and publishing held in the Archive, and artistic practices engaging in networked strategies today. Central to how Banner Repeater operates is our location, with a gallery, a bookshop and an Archive of Artists’ Publishing, deliberately sited within the ebb and flow of the commuting public. Enmeshed within the public transport networks in a busy thoroughfare of passing traffic, we distribute excellent art and artists’ publishing directly into a main artery of the city of London.

The reading room holds a permanently-sited public archive of Artists’ Publishing that provides an important bibliographic resource that all visitors to BR can browse. With the development of the Covid19 pandemic, however, Banner Repeater has gone from being a vibrant node in a network with 11,000 people passing a day, to a hotspot of potential contagion, and we are currently working towards ways to re-open with extra safety measures in place. The archive on the platform has also been undergoing renovation, and adapting to the new protocols in tandem with the upcoming launch of the Digital Archive, which of course, has never been more apt for our on-screen times, enabling the sharing of works and conversation across geographical distance. Back in 2010, we started a basic system of cataloguing the material in the archive, but it soon became clear that this was a completely inadequate response to something that should be as lively as the Archive on the platform. About four years ago Arnaud Desjardin and I started to talk about what would amount to something worth having of a digital sort, for a rapidly growing community in artists’ publishing. And then, as luck would have it, I began a long conversation with Lozana Rossenova, digital archivist and UX design and datamodeling expert, who has been working alongside Rhizome for many years. It began from a shared interest in artists’ publishing and a critical engagement with technology, which brings us to where we are today with the benefit of her great expertise.

Networked strategies underpin everything we do, pioneering a hybrid way of working in contemporary critical art practice.

Publishing is particularly interesting, historically, as it developed alongside technological advances such as the printing press, and of course, the trade and distribution networks established during the Industrial Revolution and the growth of Empire via colonialism. I’m interested in how textual productions, over time, tend to reveal something about the means of production and distribution, inflect, as well as contain, traces of the ‘subject’ - that’s me and you - emerging in synthesis with their environment, available at any given time in history. Publishing, the ‘making public of writing’, can give great insight in this sense, into how subjectivity is influenced by, and emerges through, market relations, and in a present day context, that includes twitter, tik tok, instagram, facebook and so on. Enmeshed within the protocols of platform/surveillance capitalism, what this suggests is that if it’s free, you are the product. Artists’ publishing, both historically, and in terms of what might, in the current context, blur the lines between publishing and broadcasting, via social media and other networked connectivities, makes visible through experimentation, concerns regarding the constitution of a ‘reading public’, questions of authorship, issues relating to copyright, data privacy, and so on, the dynamics of which have never been more pertinent to democracy than today.

Technology has a tendency to draw out like a poultis-existing bias and discriminations in The West, precisely because of this ludicrous notion of tech neutrality, touted by the founders of Silicon Valley, when in actuality what that privileges is a predominantly white, western, male perspective. It’s humans who design software and interact and engage with it through very specific dynamics, that include the highly exploitative practices of surveillance/platform capitalism, often predicated upon extractive relations that can be traced to colonial times. Unsurprisingly, unless you take account of these power dynamics, tech, when thought of as ‘neutral’, has a tendency to amplify existing systemic violences. Artists’ publishing is fantastically complex, with practices that range from the paperback to performance, long at the fore of pushing the potential for critical engagement, via feminist, post-colonial, queer, anti-ableist, and anti-capitalist critiques. Often these deploy strategies meant to evade the market, or prevent an easy reading that falls in step with oppressive structures inherent within language, for instance. DAAP attempts to address, in some small way, some of these problems, actually in the build, ie the

infrastructure of the archive. The project has drawn upon the working knowledge of users and archivists alike, to try to develop a database with sufficient complexity, whilst remaining searchable, that affords multiple histories to develop, confronting issues of authorship and representation, whilst addressing the challenges of cataloguing often deliberately difficult to categorise materials. DAAP developed from critique regarding the extractive relations of digital neocolonialisms, as well as historical colonialisms, in the arts programme, since 2010, and is strongly committed to challenging the politics of traditional archives that come of issues regarding inclusion and accessibility, from a post-colonial, critical gender, anti-abliest and LGBTQI perspective.

With an emphasis on inclusivity from the start, DAAP privileges anecdotal histories and multiple perspectives alongside factual data. The wiki approach (with the support of Wikimedia UK) means that users can upload their own material, single items, or entire collections (such as artist publishing from De Appel, Cybernetic Library, Asia Art Archive HK), choosing appropriate sharing permissions at time of upload. Entire collections can sit next to one another, with integrity. Utilising a linked open data environment, DAAP also brings to the surface new and unexpected data connections across diverse collection artefacts, providing a resource to link to other archives, and communities, whilst visualisation tools offer new possibilities of conducting research with data on artists’ publications. Public workshops have meant that an ethical design process has developed,

where users contribute to an ongoing discussion focusing on the ethics and biases, explicitly or implicitly embedded in database and archive infrastructures, that in turn, inform the design and development of the technological stack of the archive. The linked data database allows data to be structured in flexible ways, which can grow and develop organically around community needs, rather than conforming to rigid, pre-existing bibliographic standards. The native features of the linked-data environment have been activated within a communal practice in order for the project to support an equitable, and ethical design process throughout the archive development.

Our Team The Artists’ Publishing team is led by artist and writer Ami Clarke, founder of Banner Repeater, and curator of the arts programme and Un-Publish series, joined by experts in Artists’ Publishing: Arnaud Desjardin of The Everyday Press, Gustavo Grandal Montero librarian and researcher at UAL, curator of The Special Collections at Chelsea College of Arts Library - the oldest and one of the largest artists’ books collection in the UK, and editor of the Art Libraries Journal, and, curator and digital archivist Dr Karen Di Franco who produced Book Works digital archive. The Technical team is led by digital designer and UX researcher Lozana Rossenova, currently completing her PhD in Digital Archive Design at the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image, in collaboration with leading digital art organization Rhizome. She brings her UX design and data-modeling expertise developed

bannerrepeater.org/ digital-archive-of-artists-books

The native features of the linked data environment have been activated within a communal practice in order for the project to support an equitable, and ethical design process throughout the archive development.

during her PhD research and her professional practice in working with born-digital archives and linked open data (LOD) standards. The technical team is joined by Varia member Julie Boschat Thorez as lead developer on the project. She brings technical expertise from working on archival and conservation projects with leading digital artists and art organisations from the Netherlands, such as LIMA. Paulien Hosang has developed the visual design for the archive’s interface, drawing on experience working for non-profit clients at digital agencies both in the UK and the Netherlands. The Artists’ Publishing team is also joined by historian, archivist and writer Frances WhorrallCampbell (MA) and artist Cicilia Östholm (PhD student, Fine Art/Humanities RCA), co-initiator of equal voices in the room? who will help guide important ways to address bias and inequality through technological intervention, in order to undermine dominance and hegemonies based on gender binaries and the Western canon. Over the years important contributions have been made to the archival process by several Banner Repeater volunteers, most recently of whom have done considerable work: Charlie Pritchard, Ariel Finch, Amelia Claringbull, Louise Rutledge, and Nína Óskarsdóttir, Maša Škrinjar kindly funded by the Erasmus scheme.

Amanda Martin Katz

The Somatic Library

Your practice centres on reading as a medium, usually to explore aspects of sociality and exchange. Can you tell us about the projects and conditions that acted as precedents for 3307 W Washington Blvd and the BOOKSHELVES program, both at the beginning and as it was taking shape? AMK: I first designed structures to question notions of residency and text exchange in a project called Katz’s Deli. It began as a micro-residency and exhibition space: I invited an artist to my studio for around 10 days to use the space as if it were their own. Together, we wrote a contract to delineate the terms of our engagement, including which tools of mine they could use, how much money we would each spend on the project, whether I could pick them up from the airport, etc. Basically, we were trying to codify the conditions of production and dissemination to which we were each willing to commit in order to make something happen together. Instead of traditional openings, each residency culminated in a round-table discussion over brunch, and guests were asked to bring a text for exchange with one another. To manifest this activity, I drywalled a lone “gallery corner”—and left its 2x4 supports extended along the back wall to form a bookshelf. This kind of poetic architecture seemed fitting; textual engagement is the undergirding of so much of our discrete visual production, and the bookshelf seemed to emerge from the literal support for the space’s primary display surface. It was also dead centre in space; you saw it immediately upon entering. This first bookshelf became a site of record for the community that was forming around the project; in fact, I think of the bibliographic archive of the Katz’s Deli text exchange as a textual photograph of a space. I also like to think of it as a discursive bibliography, in that, from it, one might get a sense of the discourses we were collectively engaging and how they shifted over time. But aside from being a discussion site, the space itself rarely functioned as a reading room. Located between a car mechanic and the Santa Monica Welding Company on a dead-end light industrial lot near the freeway, it was a fascinating place to consider theory and praxis—but it wasn’t terribly amenable to a prolonged act of reading. It was so sooty that I was actually concerned about the health of some of my books there. So I was constantly shuttling these heavy canvas bags back and forth between my studio apartment and my studio art space, significantly hurting my back. I started dreaming about one day having a studio where I could house my entire library—a space where I could feel grounded, where I could feel home. When it was announced in the Spring of 2015 that the lot would be demolished to make way for “creative offices,” I took up the process of looking for a new studio as an extension of my practice itself. It was only from a critical engagement with a new space, with its architectural, cultural, environmental, and legal layers, that I could begin to determine the logistical form and conceptual structure of whatever programme I would start next. I finally found 3307 West Washington Boulevard, a mixed-use commercial manufacturing property, and not only did I choose to understand its zoning metaphorically, I began to embody the space. SLUICE: So, immediately there’s the idea of the body, a physical and emotional burden of running an art space compacted by the strain that any sort of social interaction has on oneself. You took on a role that was – organisationally and bureaucratically – a director and – socially – a host and you also physically managed the minutiae, like an intern. This is a long-winded way of saying: what role does your embodiment of the space play within these social structures you formulated? Did this take a toll on you?

Lucia Fabio

AMK: It’s natural for the artists who run spaces to play multiple roles, or perform simultaneous labors, and I wanted to push that idea (or rather, reality) to its extreme by making my personal identity synonymous with the space itself. I wanted to become a location. This required me to be present with visitors in a way that was antithetical to other exhibition spaces, wherein the gallery attendant works away quietly in the background—and yet is always vaguely poised to assist. Instead I fully offered myself as a conversant, and spent most of the open reading hours sitting on the couch with visitors surrounded by books we had pulled off the shelves to discuss. I received recommendations, thank you cards, and new publications—tangible and symbolic gestures that fed me in return.

But this all did take a toll—particularly, there is a labour to the code switching that I didn’t realise until much later. It’s as though my arm was getting tired from the constant act of taking off my director hat and putting on, say, my toilet-plunger hat. Running a space is physically and emotionally draining, despite the constant intellectual stimulation. I think that’s why a lot of artist-run spaces close after about three years. I had noticed that seemed to be the life cycle of some of the most interesting artistrun, underground spaces in L.A., so the 3-year lease I signed conveniently came to define the temporal boundaries of the embodiment. SLUICE: Your practice as an artist and a curator is one of a facilitator who sets up these physical and programmatic frameworks in order to be filled with the immaterial. BOOKSHELVES is ostensibly and descriptively a ‘thought residency;’ did you formulate this in the same way that the Katz’s Deli project instigated a form of ‘micro residency’? AMK: I initially called Katz’s Deli a micro residency because it was for such a short amount of time; that programme began traditionally in the sense that the resident flew to Los Angeles and their body replaced my body in the space. The programme later evolved to include abstract notions of “residence” — for example, Matt Broach and I signed a contract for a year-long residency that was located in my attention. I called BOOKSHELVES a “thought residency” as a kind of poor metonymy for the resident’s intellectual inquiry residing on the bookshelf itself, in the form of a selection of books on-loan from her home library. Furthermore, her/these ideas are taking up residence in my mind, as mine are in hers as she in turn explores my library collection. It was from our exchange of textual engagement, of intellectual attention, that we then developed reading environments and public programmes that would expand and extrapolate, or perhaps, transfigure, those dialogues into immersive and somatic formats. Into formats that essentially allowed us to invite others into the space to collectively feel the ideas presented on the shelves through events like meals, sound performances, tea ceremonies, and even sleepovers. SLUICE: You use social paradigms, particularly meals, to facilitate an expansion of what the residency is and how you perform within that residency. I feel, primarily, that BOOKSHELVES facilitates discourse in its multifaceted ways. How did performing these situations in the space differ from the everyday meal at home, for instance?

Meghan Gordan

AMK: I began using the meal as an occasion to gather and generate discourse because I wanted people to just relax and talk. To discuss Marcel Mauss while biting into a pickle and spraying the juice across your face will lighten the mood a bit—so I’m curious as to whether these convivial contexts can help us to better socially metabolise theory. It need not be something we just enjoy feeling good about understanding only in specific contexts. Eventually, we leave these contexts and we go, and we live, and we produce, and we organise, and we negotiate in these other ways that are ultimately ruled by other social conventions. When it comes to talking and eating, two essential acts ruled by myriad social conventions, the opportunities for push and play, for challenge and for comfort, seem endless. Even Reagan knew that great change begins at the dinner table. The meal-based programming at 3307 allowed me to simultaneously create a somatic textual experience and fully perform the ‘host’ role I was embodying through the space. For the dinner Cooking the Bookshelf with resident Lucia Fabio, we wrote a menu to correspond with a discussion of texts from her titles on-loan, which included The Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Illness as Metaphor, by Susan Sontag, and The Dali Cookbook, by Salvador Dali. The meal began with a reinterpretation of Alison Knowles’ Identical Lunch, during which Lucia spoke to the group about the history of food-based experimentations during Fluxus. We then served one whole fish to clusters of four people, with the only option of portioning it out with their hands. This course was accompanied by Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet. But it was the ritual of lining up to drink bone broth that created the greatest sense of intimacy amongst the group. The guests had been asked to bring a cup from home, which they temporarily exchanged with each other, and after leaving the table to drink the broth, they were asked to return to a new seat at the table. Lucia spoke about the Sontag text and described her process of making the bone broth for her mother who was dying of cancer. You could feel in that moment, when everyone sat back down in their new place, that a bond had been formed from a sense of having shared something private, and with it came an invitation to continue to share further.

SLUICE: Of course, you have to consider the relationship between host and guest and labour implicit within each of these events. AMK: A host and a guest cannot exist without the other. And to me, that’s the beauty of hosting — you can’t be a host if someone doesn’t agree to be hosted. This is why the host-guest dynamic of the dinner party, and the residency at large, is a critical relationship through which I explore collaborative art practice. It’s essentially a social contract. It’s a social agreement. And part of the labour of the host is to design the conditions in which a guest is able to arrive. So often a good host’s labour is invisible and, in many ways, I aim to achieve that ideal. What makes it a critical practice, I think, is how and when and why I choose to reveal what labour. Throughout the entire programme I’ve had this underlying conceptual project in which I was performing domesticity within a space that would typically be ascribed to a masculine-modernist architectural ideal. By rescripting the role of “director” as “host,” I wondered if I could infuse the myriad labours that constitute the operating of an arts space with a sense of intimacy, a sense of caring, and a sense of reciprocity. I made a decision to forgo the institutional preoccupation of “building community” in favour of “nurturing relationships”—one could argue those are the same thing (or at least part and parcel of one another) but the distinct wording is significant. To me, the difference between building community and nurturing relationships is not only embedded in their verbal gender-codes, but also relates to an idea of presumption. Instead of trying to amass a following, I designed the programme to foster networks, to offer space and occasion for relationships to form around mutual interests in self-education. SLUICE: Notions of intimacy seem to run through every aspect of this project, from your collaborative relationships with each of the Bookshelves residents to the host/guest dynamic you performed with visitors to the space. It’s even embedded within the website design itself, particularly in the Permanent Library Catalogue where your column “Acquisition Source” reveals things like “gifted from an ex-lover” and “stolen from Mom.” That’s a really beautiful way of personalising public discourse, of imbuing, or rather, enriching, knowledge production with a deep sense of the personal.

Charlotte Tailett

AMK: So that’s one of the things I was working on last year. While running the residency and doing all of these dinners and events, the only way to experience the permanent collection [i.e. my collection], was to physically come to the space. There was no catalogue. So for the post-programmatic experience of the space I wanted to create a searchable database, one that would not only be a digital record of my collection but would also represent the social and locational forces that informed its constitution. I came up with this idea of an expanded bibliography that combined each book’s bibliographic information with the social and locational conditions in which in came into my possession. And the process of cataloging my own library gave me an even greater intimacy with my own collection SLUICE: A collection - whether of books, records, etc - is an autobiography of sorts. How did it feel having your collection not only made public but then rearranged and even critiqued? AMK: I felt a bit bare, but I think people were mainly focused on exploring the titles onloan from the residents, and celebrating their practices and personalities. But part of this project (and this is what people didn’t see) was that each time that a resident came in, they took all the books down and took all of the shelves out, rearranged them. So I was actually physically touching, handling every single book with each resident. And each woman helped me, not even always outright verbally, but just the process helped me to see connections within my collection and connections within my education, personal biases that I’ve accumulated through the different educational spaces that I’ve been a part of, et cetera. So in a way, this project, without ever saying it outright, was to really try to understand the way that personal biases are formed or created through our educational histories, race, class, culture, family. But then there also are these seemingly random or microcosmic forces that influence us, for example, you know, I met a guy in a bar and he recommended a book and, you know, or someone’s hitting on you and they tell you to read this thing. And next thing you

know, you’re on a whole other track. So I created a format to represent all of the ways in which both chance encounters and cultural forces ultimately shape how we know what we know. SLUICE: These sorts of things are the secret histories of each book as an object. And there’s a final sculpture as an end point and a documentation of it. AMK: There’s a final arrangement of the shelves, which I arranged, and it has been installed since the programme closed. I would say I did it by myself but actually I really did it with Bridget Batch, who photographed each arrangement throughout the entire project. She’s the unofficial ‘resident of all residents’ because she was with me from the beginning. Bridget really watched me grow on this journey. And I got to watch her son grow up as well. I organised it based on the books that were given to me as gifts in the three years of the project. Where the gift of the book came out of a conversation or other sort of engagement that I had with that person that really wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t done this project in the first place. SLUICE: And you’re also materialising the documents of the thought residencies in book form. What role does that material finished product or archival object have? AMK: The idea was to create a bibliography of bibliographies or a book of books, kind of a somewhat self-referential object, But ultimately, I see it’s real use value as a reference tool. This book of all of the residences will essentially contain a beautiful visual archive of the project, which I think would satisfy me and everyone involved to the degree in which pleasure is a part of art making. But, more than that, it could also be used as an alternative syllabus. The idea that a young artist could find this book and see the ways in which a group of female-identifying artists, with various backgrounds and educational histories, came to our educations and engaged with different texts to shape our discrete visual production, our practices as artists, curators, archivists, etc. is enough of a reason to do this. It could provide an example of the attempt to selfeducate herself. That notion of self-education and awareness is not always possible in the conditions of the institution and cultural forces that shape you.

Fleurette West

All photos by Bridget Batch

In 2016, artist Amanda Martin Katz founded the Los Angeles art space 3307 W Washington Blvd, where she built a modular sculpture as the basis for her residency program, BOOKSHELVES. Dismantling the constructs of her own education, Katz designed BOOKSHELVES to be a continually shifting site where transdisciplinary ontologies emerge from each resident’s reconfiguration of the collection. 3307wwashingtonblvd.com

Library as Memorial

Ruth Beale

Time is going super fast We thought time would have been going slower, but it’s been going faster Boring Boring Bor-ing The pandemic has messed with our sense of time. High levels of stress make us feel like time is passing slowly. Repetition, especially in lockdown, and little distinction to mark the days, can make it pass more quickly. Between April and July, I ran some creative workshops on Zoom with young people from Brent Youth Parliament, talking about their experience of lockdown and my upcoming commission at Kilburn Library. They told me about their feelings of loss, and worry, and boredom. We like how in libraries everyone is there to do the same thing In 2010, in the wake of sweeping cuts to local authorities, Brent was in the news for its Library Transformation Project, which included the closure of 5–7 of 12 libraries. In 2020, the libraries service has embraced the Borough of Culture programme, and there are art commissions connected to each of the 10 remaining council and community libraries. The mood now is positive, but the scars have not entirely healed in the community libraries which local people had to fight for.

Digital books - real books are better I was commissioned as part of the Borough of Culture programme, a recent Mayor of London initiative that sees one borough a year awarded over £1m. My project for the newly termed Brent Biennial had initially been about imagining the library as a think tank, so using its resources to question and celebrate the potential of public space. There was going to be a sleepover curated by children from a local school, a big public meal, and events where young people and communities were able to take over the space. Then we went into lockdown, and everything closed. The gaps in schools and technology Before Covid, public libraries were one of the few free, indoor public spaces where you could just ‘be’. We know that there are things people really need libraries for, like books, free wifi, computers and work space. My experience of Brent’s libraries out of lockdown was of people browsing, borrowing books, studying, meeting and working, of busy songtimes, knitting clubs and reading groups. They range from handsome Victorian buildings, to high-street shops, to new shopping-centre style lounges with tiled floors, the favourite of the under 25s. The gaps are widening The pandemic exposed stark inequalities entrenched in the UK after 12 years of austerity and 40 years of neoliberalism. Those worst affected by coronavirus are those with worse health outcomes even before the pandemic, including people in lower-paid work, people of Asian, African and Afro-Caribbean descent, and people living in poorer areas. In Brent, people in Harlesden and Church End lost many members of their communities. As a whole, the borough experienced the highest death rate at the height of the first wave.

Ruth Beale Library as Memorial 2020 Kilburn Library, part of Brent Biennial Brent 2020

Photos: Thierry Bal

Library as memorial Memorials are difficult. Families of the Grenfell Tower fire have said that a planned memorial, and their exclusion from the process, has not helped them: “Instead of bringing closure and healing, this process is adding more grief and anxiety”. It can also be hard to mark an ending when still in the thick of it. Amongst all the numbers and data, and government measures, I’ve been struggling to hear the names and stories of those who have died prematurely because of this virus. Can we still humanise as the tragedy unfolds? Silence as memorial My project became two things – 491 bookplates in books from across the borough’s libraries, with bookplates ready for personal dedications by the public. That’s the same number as people who had died of coronavirus in Brent up to the opening of the Biennale. And a film of six of Brent’s libraries filmed during lockdown during an extended period of closure. The book selection was chosen with staff in each library, drawing on their knowledge of literary genres and local interest, from South Asian language books in Ealing Road, to local history in Willesden, to Harlesden’s collection of books by Black writers and poets. It was a strange brief trying to find books that people might want to dedicate, ones that felt like they might have some longevity. They’ll go back across the borough, and London if they’re borrowed through the London Library consortium.

We thought time would have been going slower, but it’s been going faster

Missing freedom Missing friends

We connect books to people’s interests, knowledge and identities. And books on a shelf have a physical presence, like people. They can be counted. Whiteread’s Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial in Vienna is a cast of library shelves. Yinka Shonibare’s British Library is a collection of hardback books covered in Dutch wax printed cotton textile, with the names of first- or second-generation immigrants to Britain, both celebrated and lesser-known, printed on the spines.

Worried about corona Worried about... Wasting time - not learning something

It makes us stressed and hate the situation Gaps in schools Gaps in technology Gaps in who is safe The gaps are widening During lockdown, the children’s playground on my street was subject to more and more heavy-duty protection. It started with hazard tape, moving on to orange mesh fencing and padlocks, before anticlimb mental fencing and concrete bases arrived. A worker on the checkout in Lidl told me that whilst everything was closed, people would come and wander around for hours. For some people at that time, being in Lidl was preferable to being at home. School is strange We expect a lot of ourselves sometimes The A-Level results debacle in the summer illustrated how algorithms replicate human problems, giving young people from private schools with smaller cohorts better results, as if education inequality needed a leg up. Lockdown also exacerbated the digital divide. The young people I met were worried about their future.

Holding Breath documents six of Brent’s libraries during lockdown: Ealing Road, Harlesden, Kilburn, Kingsbury, Willesden Green and Wembley Central. It’s strange tying to film absence. The DOP and I searched for evidence of people; messy desks, grubby walls, tape on the floor. Also the moments and changes that are otherwise going unseen: light passing, or a bramble creeping in the window. Vacant spaces with all the chairs on the tables. Some of the libraries were newly decorated and spotless - we didn’t want it to look like architectural photography, so we sought out awkward viewpoints. We recorded the clocks ticking and the hum of air conditioning and lightbulbs. We’ve noticed that it’s quieter We’ve noticed that the streets are cleaner In a short space of time many of us developed new rituals of variable efficacy: washing shopping in disinfectant, daily walks, elbow bumping greetings, leaving our post in the sun. In libraries, returned books are quarantined in boxes which are labelled with a date in 3 days’ time, when they may be opened. Most local authorities have, for now at least, tentatively reopened their libraries, with supermarket style ‘click and collect’, Brent is allowing browsing and computer bookings, but there are no other chairs. A friend in Korea sent me a photo of an UV machine in Seoul, designed to zap library books. In my local library in Lambeth, we stand at the door whilst a member of staff browses the shelves on our behalf.

Ruth Beale Library as Memorial 2020 Kilburn Library, part of Brent Biennial Brent 2020

Photos: Thierry Bal

Ruth Beale Holding Breath (film stills) 2020 12 minutes Digital film and audio

Camera and edit: Reuben Henry Voiceover: Ayan Abdi

Exploring outside Parks and trees Sit down and think In the film, the garden at Kilburn Library is overgrown and dry, as the volunteers who usually look after it could not access it. From the room where the video is shown, you can see that the garden is being cared for again. Sit down and think Remember happy times? Peaceful Lighter Appreciation Gratitude The Library as Memorial installation is quiet and personal, and in a way, quite ordinary. The dedications are slowly trickling in. After the Biennial there won’t be anything to visit, only the books back in circulation across the borough and across London. There are blessings in everything, even in loss Family is more together Feel sad or happy – together It’s not a short-time thing The grass in the garden has been growing a lot Time to pause An artist friend who lives in Brent, who came with me to the non-opening opening, said that perhaps the legacy of this project is not just the bits of paper in the books, as they distribute back out and are seen by those who borrow or browse, but working out how we feel about it all, how we feel about this loss we’ve experienced. Slowing down

The words in italics are the script for the voiceover of Holding Breath. They were edited together from the words of members of Brent Youth Parliament, scribbled down during online workshops. The voiceover is read by 16-year-old Ayan Abdi, a member of the group. Ruth Beale is a London-based artist with a long-standing interest in collaborative production, exploring implications in culture, governance, social discourse and representation. She also works in collaboration with Amy Feneck as The Alternative School of Economics. Holding Breath and Library as Memorial was commissioned by Brent Biennial / Brent 2020 ruthbeale.net

Duncan Poulton e-hoarder (The Fast and the Furious) 2020 Digital Collage

Content Anxiety

Duncan Poulton

Duncan Poulton & Wessel Baarda OKOKOKOKOK 2020 Digital Collage

Duncan Poulton Wastepaper 2019 Digital Collage

Duncan Poulton SOFTWARE 2019 Digital Collage

Duncan Poulton IPHONE 2019 Digital Collage

Duncan Poulton Sharpened 2019 Digital Collage

Duncan Poulton Dream of Fields 2020 Digital Collage

Duncan Poulton Untitled (Haunted UI) 2020 Digital Collage

Duncan Poulton is a London-based artist working in an expanded form of collage, realised through digital video and image assemblage. Working exclusively with found material, he enacts an ongoing remediation of our increasingly virtual world. He is a 2020 participant in the Syllabus, an alternative learning programme led by Wysing Arts Centre and arts venues across England. duncanpoulton.com

Art of Change

Florence Devereux

Clementine Butler-Gallie

Art of Change is a radio programme that airs on the nonprofit, arts and culture station Resonance FM. The first series of 9 weekly episodes, was produced in response to the COVID-19 crisis, weaving artistic perspectives and sound works together as a way to make sense of the seismic change humanity went through in those early days of the pandemic. In the second series, 5 artists responded to the 5 basic elements of fire, earth, water, air and space, as a way to think through change as a phenomena in itself. The producers of the show, curators Clementine Butler-Gallie and Florence Devereux, discuss what this mission meant when they began, now, and what its value may be in the future.

Flo: Well, well, well! 2020, a year to archive, a year to remember, a year we tried to respond to in real-time. You got in touch with me at the end of March. I was sitting in a basement in London, you were in your studio in Leipzig. Countries were locking down - boom boom boom, like thick-celled dominos. I think you had a sense that History was being made. You said, ‘let’s explore radio’ - one intention was to create an alternative, democratic space to share quality artwork to soothe our weary, fear-filled, pandemic spooked souls. Since March we have produced two series of Art of Change - the first series, was more about the immediate response to the pandemic exploring topics such as Community Action, Healing Rituals, Loneliness, and Artistic Freedom, whereas the second series became more abstract, thematically grounded by the 5 basic elements of Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Space. Having delved into the specific changes our communities were experiencing due to covid, we wanted to escape the immediate and think more universally about change. Working with the basic building blocks, as recognised by many cultures around the world, and inviting artists to grapple with each element and how it is integral to change, was fascinating and expanded what we thought was possible to emerge out of this moment. Another intention was, perhaps, to ‘capture’ the moment. A sense that the monumental was smacking us around the face. Did you want to archive the unfolding story? Did you desire order in that moment of chaos? To timestamp it and make sure you were writing your History in the way that made sense to you? Clementine: I totally identify as one of those spooked souls! I guess Art of Change became a space where we could nurture that unknown state in ourselves and others. I found there was such a temporal (and physical) tension between the immediate and the distant - I was constantly losing touch with time, yet updating my news channels constantly. There felt as much a need to capture this uncertain rhythm of time as the idea of history unfolding. We usually think of the terms History and Archive as being in the past tense. The medium of radio, however, is very present, a space for immediacy. I guess, in that misty moment, something was appealing and somewhat emblematic about producing a project that could also be a temporal playground. So to answer your question about finding order and making sense of the moment, I think perhaps it was the opposite, it was to ride on the wave of disorder, but to also somehow document that journey. When you called me to propose the title ‘Art of Change’, it was fitting on so many levels. Flo: I suppose life is a continuous change, it’s always unravelling and becoming lines of the unexpected. So much human effort is directed towards trying to ‘grasp’ this chaos. Writing, organising, defining identities. I am interested in the creative space where the ego lets go of control and what I enjoyed about the process of making Art of Change was that we couldn’t be too considered, too controlled, as we were responding to events that were affecting humanity drastically and unexpectedly from moment to moment. So we produced it in real-time, but can you document real-time!? I’ve been reading In The Wake, On Blackness and Being, where Christina Sharpe skillfully

We usually think of the terms History and Archive as being in the past tense. The medium of radio, however, is very present.

points out that the past bleeds into the present, and our future selves are making decisions for us, always already. That reminds me of Demelza Toy Toy’s work from our second series.

Clementine: I loved Demelza Toy Toy’s episode for Art of Change, it was like a chant or spell that really transported me out of the present reality. Her words looped throughout the episode, which shifted the traditional timeline. There is one part where she repeated the words ‘I was about 10 when I started to question how important a history was. In order to exist I made a conscious effort to refuse history outside of what I had experienced, just so I could feel more at ease in the world. Instead, I focused on the future, and every night for many many years well into adulthood I went to sleep constructing future memories…’ I do think that Art of Change documents in realtime but I feel that it does so through collecting future visions; those of the contributing artists. As Demelza’s focus on the future was a form of escapism from the past, perhaps the radio series is in fact our own form of escapism from the present? Playing with these different spaces in time actually became some kind of therapeutic method! So perhaps Art of Change is in fact more of a library of future visions. Flo: Ummm, I enjoy thinking about Art of Change as a library of future visions, and also Demelza Toy Toy’s memory - her constructing her future visions every night before bed. I get filled with longing and am reminded of my nighttimes between 7-10 years of age when I stood at my window and made the same prayer every night (and also looked in at the block of flats opposite, enjoying my very own silent movie). To my astonishment, the prayer came true, and my atheist family was shocked when at 13, I got confirmed. I obviously owed God something! The future vision had arrived! But like many unintended consequences, that new reality was worse than before... Be careful what you pray for and who you communicate with! Noureddine Ezarraf’s investigation into ‘air’ struck a chord with me on this note, as he plays with the surreal nature of communicating with an unknown audience. When you pray where is the inner desire going? When you broadcast through radio, who is actually listening? There is the paradox of longing to be close to our future selves and also to stay separate from the trauma that that future/past living entails. When I think back to the birth of Art Of Change, I had a longing to connect, to bridge the gap between the isolation of my basement flat, to collaborate and exchange. The process of making Art of Change has been an interesting one for collaboration. Clementine: Totally! Creating a space for connection was a core intention for both of us. That desire for connection took the form of collaborating with the artists and giving them a sonic stage, and in turn, connecting the listeners with their work and words. Within that desire for collaboration also came the vital question of diversity of perspective. We would spend hours researching artists who were making work that connected with each episode’s theme, we knew the importance of collaborating beyond our network, beyond our bases in the UK and Germany. Right now we’ve collected 24 different visions that span numerous artistic mediums, geographies, and feelings. This library is still so small, just a minuscule snapshot of artistic voices

I enjoy thinking about Art of Change as a library of future visions.

but hopefully, it will only continue to expand and diversify, to grow its value for anyone who may unlock it in the future. So let’s say someone happened upon Art of Change’s archive in 2050, what do you hope they would gain from it?

Flo: Ooh a question for our future friends! I am hoping that by 2050 we will be living in fully automated, communist communities, structurally organised with animist ethics as the guiding principle. So I hope these future someones would listen to Art Of Change and feel grateful that they live in a different world to 2020!! But hopefully, the threads of change that lead to this utopian future would be felt through listening to the radio. Maybe they will listen to the programme and think ‘how naive! They hoped there was an opportunity for change as a result of the pandemic!’ I mean, whatever the future holds, the people of 2050 might be interested to hear how a past community coped with a cataclysmic event and the first series of Art Of Change documents some immediate responses to global lockdown. Humans experiencing a crisis, communicating with the issue through artistic practice, is fascinating from a sociological, psychological, and formalist perspective. The second series is certainly more utopian and visionary, and the episodes work with voice, incantation, and the power of the word to activate positive change. Maybe the future listener would feel the looping nature of time, as the issues, dreams, and visions of the Art of Change artists could rhyme with their worlds. It’s been a rich experience going into the dream world with the artists over this period. Where would you like to see Art Of Change go? Clementine: The experience was indeed rich and in many ways rescuing and rejuvenating as we live in this continued fluctuating state of uncertainty. For me, ‘change’ is just an umbrella theme of the radio programme and the complexities of this vast topic have the potential to be played out through each series, and further still with each episode. I’m not sure what topic we will ground ourselves with in the next series of Art of Change but I would like it to take us into a dimension filled with optimism and revolution. If this sonic library could one day be bundled into a bottle and released to sea, I would want whoever found it to hear that there was also a lot of hope and creativity floating through this strange time! Flo: Yeah, what a time to be alive! This conversation has actually ignited a desire to work with the specifically slippery, bleeding nature of time and change. Let’s work on that for the next series! If anyone reading this would like to be involved, get in-touch. We love collaborating with new people. And for anyone who listens to the show, do send in reflections - we are always up for change ;-) artofchangeradio.com

This conversation has actually ignited a desire to work with the specifically slippery, bleeding nature of time and change.

GENTRY, Alistair

Big Archives, libraries and shared resources have always been prime targets for cultural cleansers and tyrants. Have a look at Wikipedia’s list of destroyed libraries for a depressing slice out of the biblioclasty cake, with Christians burning the libraries of Muslims and indigenous people, Muslims burning the libraries of Christians and Sikhs, emperors erasing their own people’s histories, and both Communists and Nazis starting by burning books and ending by burning people, to paraphrase Heinrich Heine’s famous warning.

B And why?

Mobile Because in any era of ideological conflict and supremacy of opinion over fact– and sorry/not sorry, our current ‘fake news’ narcissistic Insta-trainwreck of a culture isn’t the first or worst of its kind, it’s just the biggest – libraries and archives usually preserve a multiplicity of perspectives. Even if, perhaps especially if, these perspectives are in conflict with each other, this makes them a corrective against attempts to rewrite history or manipulate the present. A person or a regime who knows they’re doing or saying wrong always takes collective intelligence and shared knowledge as a potential

rebuke, even if it’s just a passive one from a book on a shelf or a file in a subdirectory of a hard drive somewhere. Luckily there are relatively few genuine cackling lunatic supervillains on Earth at any one time – the likes of Peter Thiel and Donald Trump – but people in the banality of evil leagues and on the relegation list for karmic demotion usually know it perfectly well, and they hate nothing more than anyone or anything having the audacity to correct their moral or factual errors. The truth, or the idea that there is a truth, is highly destabilising to anyone whose foundation is lies. Context strangles propaganda at birth.

Public This isn’t the only reason we should treasure and understand shared resources, and nor is the inherent value of knowledge. The library is also a metaphor of how our world could be; a free repository of assets (in every sense of the word free) from which everybody withdraws according to their need, on the understanding that some people either inherently, circumstantially, or due to structural inequity have more need than others. Imagine a national (and eventually international, universal) basic asset library for artists… not necessarily of books but of shared and freely available knowledge, provided formally but ubiquitously at grassroots level

and all the way up to the national institutions, who become midwives or ecologists of culture instead of gatekeepers. Systematise peer support instead of it always being ad hoc, last minute, reliant on goodwill and charity. All the stuff it’s not efficient for any individual artist to do full time, shared by (and paid for) by fair progressive taxes and above all by the people who currently profit from the creativity of artists with little or no trickle-down of money or benefit to those artists. An always-on register of duty legal experts, agents, studio technicians, accountants, sales people, mentors, accessibility consultants, community liaisons.

Library Universal mass access to art and design software, editing software, printing machines, 3D fabrication equipment. Costumes, fabric, paint, wood, metal, clay, speakers, lights. Of course all of these things exist as resources available to some cohorts of artists, sometimes as genuine collectivised resources but mainly for those who can afford to pay and networked or geographically located in the right way to gain access to them. The artists who can afford to pay are very often those same old privileged artists who started playing the game on its easiest setting anyway, and never needed or used a public library, or anything with the

The artists who can afford to pay are very often those same old privileged artists who started playing the game on its easiest setting anyway,

Energy principles of one… except maybe to plunder public goods for private profit. What I really want is an artists’ universal library of stuff that has the ethos of the Star Trek replicator; it doesn’t matter who you are, you just say what you need and it appears in a postmarket, post-scarcity beam of light. If that could literally happen I’d be thrilled, obviously, but I’ll settle for the principle: people who genuinely need stuff just get what they need. Or if luxury 23rd century space communism doesn’t blow your skirt up and nostalgia is more your thing,

what about the ethos of the mobile library that used to come around once every few weeks to the village I lived in as a child? Free books for everyone who needs them, provided everyone else can share them too… because if you can do something like this for people, and live your life without taking more than you need or depriving anyone else, why wouldn’t you?

A CAS project space initiative

Chapter 1: Dissent

ENT

Photo by Maija Liepins

Susan Merrick Lilo in a puddle 2019

Chapter: a vehicle for developing creative methodologies of dissent and collaboration

DIS

CHAPTERS challenges the notion of a singular author or editor. Each Chapter is a conversation, a collaborative art-research project which invites the presence of multiple voices, interpretations, and combinations. Generated through artist-led events and activities,

Jade Montserrat Unable to Believe

each chapter takes the form of an ongoing ‘living’ archive and a collection of artworks.

The Chapters archive had been pretty much mothballed with everything else during the lockdown period, holed away in the nether regions of the CAS project space. Turns out it was not hibernating quietly but bubbling and fizzing away with its restless contents. Back in 2015 when CAS (Chapel Arts Studios) started to dig around amongst the deeds and papers of the org’s small but distinctive chapel, a watercolour drawing of the plot at the centre of Andover cemetery was discovered. In faint but careful writing above what is now the CAS building was written ‘Dissenters Chapel’. Turns out back in the 1800s, a subversive group of dedicated worshippers, most likely Baptist or Methodist, refusing to conform to the doctrine of the established church, cut loose and hung out in this neat little sanctuary, or so the story goes. Dissent and fervour are a potent mix. Scrolling forwards to 2009, Chapel Arts Studios, initiated by artist David Dixon with the support of Test Valley Arts Foundation, began developing into a hub of diverse artists, held together with a passion for exploratory work, socially-engaged practice and a strong desire to build a mutually-supportive network. Needless to say, they were more than happy to pick up the baton of dissent handed to them by their predecessors and claim the dissent methodology as a working model. Now an NPO, with an established programme of associate artists and a strong community focus, CAS still works to retain its forebearer’s standpoint of questioning accepted societal structures and norms. The Chapters archive is one such ongoing project and serves as a repository for such troublesome questions. Browbeaten and buffeted from all sides by the political and social turmoil as we all are at this time, it has been an interesting experience for the purposes of this article, to explore its contents once more. Chapters began life back in 2015 as an idea for a publication entitled ‘Chapters of Dissent’ by the then programme coordinator and curator, Lydia Heath, now gallery manager for O N C A in Brighton. CAS engagement manager Maija Liepins, pushed the idea further, eschewing the constraints of producing a print publication, instead favouring ‘a more flexible proposal of website pages to be linked and unlinked effortlessly, [...] an unbound book that multiple editors could re-curate to create new meanings and thus better reflect our evolving collective conversation’. Eventually the idea settled into an ever-developing physical archive of artists contributions towards a growing conversation around dissent. Funded by an Arts Council R&D grant, Maija Liepins, and former subsequent curator, Dawn Evans, plus various CAS associate artists, set about on a period of discovery and learning around the practice of archiving. After attending both a discussion event at the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton and a guided visit to the Ashmolean archive in Oxford, the Chapters archive was born. Four years in and opening the black unmarked box once more, it is overwhelmingly apparent what a dynamic and valuable venture it has proved to be. An artist’s

Archived work can make for uncomfortable viewing. Frozen as it is in the culture of its time, not everything may chime well with

Susan Francis Curator at CAS

69 Further entries include written declarations, material objects, essays, remnants of performance; dissent both small and personal, loud and universal. Laurence Dube Rushby’s ‘Letter to Fantnu’, written at the peak of the Calais Jungle crisis sits amongst them. Following a fire that ripped through the camp, the artist helped the refugee sift through the ashes for a key that was never found, the letter apologises - she could have looked longer. More recently Jade Montserrat’s work, ‘Unable to believe that thoughts are free’ could not have been more prescient, just pre-empting as it did, the global upheaval of the BlackLivesMatter events. Exuberant dissent in material and practice also features, from Sarah Misselbrook, working off grid in the Catalonian mountains, her stone tinged mouth impregnated with the ashes of past drawings, to Jonathan Kelham’s playful interrogation of the dogma of Englishness or Susan Merrick’s restaging of Millais’ Ophelia on a lilo, a precursor to her current interest in the destructive exclusivity of class within the artworld. The process of archiving is a dissent in itself – against the physical ravages of time at least. It says ‘This is here and this is what it is’. Already the passing of just four years has adjusted the cultural lens by degrees through which these works are viewed. Who could have imagined that the division of wealth, highlighted by the Calais refugee crisis would have another layer of complexity added. In The West in particular, with our problematic collections and museums brimming with oversees booty, society has also become acutely aware that archived work can make for uncomfortable viewing. Frozen as it is in the culture of its time, not everything may chime well with future attitudes. But this makes the process all the more important surely, forcing this reflection of where we were, to where we have come. CAS is interested in expanding the conversation and would encourage organisations and groups of artists who may wish to borrow the archive as a provocation for further work, a conversation starter or the initiator for a project to get in touch. It remains open for submission and welcomes proposals.

future attitudes. But this makes the process all the more important surely, forcing this reflection of where we were, to where we have come.

voice can be an ephemeral thing, at least for those individuals whose productions are not immortalised by the commercial giants of the gallery market or the hallowed collections of national institutions. Even for those within this inner circle, the outlying deposits from practice are often carried away on temporal winds or lost by the wayside. Submissions have been gathered either organically, serendipitously or intentionally, from artists passing through, as either past exhibitors, speakers, resident artists or CAS associates. Any artist in fact, can put forward a simple A3 submission to be considered for inclusion. Entry No: 1, fittingly, is a photograph of a door, a way in to what lies ahead. It is an old door, no longer in use, locked, sealed and overgrown on Greenham Common. The lettering which once warned anyone attempting to enter has been redacted by time itself, (which seems to have a dark sense of humour), the word WARNING, reduced to WAR, and ATTENTION reduced simply to TTENTION.

chapelartsstudios.co.uk

Karl England

Like all men of the Library, I have traveled in my youth; I have wandered in search of a book, perhaps the catalogue of catalogues. —Jorge Luis Borges

Meaning is produced and reproduced. Alternative understandings of origin, order, and authority are forged and reforged. The human experience is one of searching for and imposing meaning where none may be evident. The librarian and archivist brings order to perceived chaos, the library enforces a hierarchy, a means of navigation. It is testament to the self absorption of the human condition that we materially and spiritually subjugate Gaia to the human endeavour. Pathetic fallacy. As my daughter once memorably quipped as our train meandered through the english countryside “is that the background daddy?”. The mapping and cataloging of the natural world is always an act of colonisation. It can also be seen as an attempt

to come to terms with the impact of the Anthropocene on the earth’s geology and ecosystems. The archiving of our impact is both an act of hubris (that the earth wouldn’t recover Post-Anthropocene) and of reckoning (our future as a species). Pasture Projects an artist-led project in Sudbury run by Ruth Philo and Stuart Bowditch has started a Mapping the Mulberry project as a way of tracing the lost silk industry. (Morus Londinium by The Conservation Foundation is doing likewise in London). One of the trees mapped by Pasture Projects is in Groton, Suffolk where a black mulberry is thought to be one of the oldest in Britain. The tree was planted c.1550 by Adam Winthrop, grandfather of John Winthrop who was the leader of the Puritans (the first to establish a colony in America)

and became the first governor of Massachusetts in the 1630s. But most surviving Mulberry trees in England stem from the industrial planting encouraged by King James I in 1607–8 in an attempt to create an English Silk Industry. Silk worms feed off Mulberry leaves.

Many insects are useful to humans, but only two are reared on a large scale: silkworms and honeybees. The mulberry silkworm is the only species widely reared for commercial use. It has been domesticated for so long that it can no longer survive in the wild. Here, with the Mulberry trees,

the mapping is archiving the past, pulling historical motivations into the present by cataloging the unordered – seemingly randomly scattered trees – remnants of lost orchards. Pasture Project’s Mulberry mapping is a continuation of an associated project called Fabric: Silk Road, an ongoing cultural and ethnographic exchange making connections between the silk mills of Sudbury, Suffolk and the silk industry and traditions in China. These projects treat the landscape as a palimpsest of human activity. Mapping and reinstating the story of human intervention on the natural world as it hides in plain sight. Projecting forwards into the near future is the Future Library a project by Katie Paterson. The Future Library will take one hundred years to come to fruition. Paterson planted one thousand Spruce saplings

in Norway in 2014. The purchase of a limited edition certificate entitles the owner to one complete set of one hundred texts printed on the paper made from the trees which constitute the future library after they are felled in 2114. A new text by a different author is announced each year. But the texts themselves are not revealed and will not be published until 2114, when the spruce forest will finally be felled. In a way, each text is a time capsule creating a future history, as each text projects into the future but will only be realised as historical documents in one hundred years. Knowledge is tied up in the fabric of the tree before it’s felled, pressed, bound and imprinted into book form. The language of trees, how they communicate with each other, how they sustain microclimates

and ecologies is well known. Upon reconstitution as printed matter a recursive restamping of meanings is layered on top of the innate information already molecularly bound into the material. A layering of meaning. Tree, wood, paper, book, library. Form, content, subject. Meaning is produced and reproduced. Alternative understandings of origin, order, and authority are forged and reforged.

The Library is unlimited and cyclical. —Jorge Luis Borges

pastureprojectspace.co.uk futurelibrary.no

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The truth, or the idea that there is a truth, is highly destabilising to anyone whose foundation is lies. Context strangles propaganda at birth.