PLACE, PEOPLE AND TIME
PUBLISHING AS AN ARTISTIC PRACTICE
2019

This Guided Group Residency was devised by The Museum of Loss and Renewal in partnership with My Bookcase. It will be offered again in 2022 for creative practitioners working with printed matter and publishing as an artistic practice and for those who have a strong interest in this area.

The outcome of the residency was a collective publication in magazine format, which was presented at the Printing Plant Art Book Fair in Amsterdam in November 2019, and the group residents’ work will be featured this year by offline residency partner MAP magazine.

Approach

The Guided Group Residency provided a partially-structured and hands-on programme to enable residents to develop their skills and understanding of artists’ publications and publishing. The Group Residency experience was designed to stimulate new ways of thinking and experimentation through production, research, learning and presentation. Residents worked collectively and individually. The Group Residency evolved around the idea of the book as a platform for creative encounters. By listening, looking and making residents investigated image, text, typography, object and context relationships.

The aim of this Group Residency was to provide a supportive and stimulating environment to develop participants’ production skills and knowledge of artists’ publications, printed matter and publishing as an artistic practice. Alongside individual practice, the Group Residency had a focus on knowledge exchange, creating opportunities to learn from each other. These sessions were facilitated by Cristina Garriga (My Bookcase) and Tracy Mackenna & Edwin Janssen (The Museum of Loss and Renewal). The Group Residency in 2019 had an offline engagement with the international experts and like-minded initiatives dpr-barcelona, MAP Magazine (online) and Print The Future/The Future Publishing and Printing (Amsterdam) that provided bespoke content, expanding the Residency in time and space.

PARTICIPANTS

Adrián Quezada Ruiz

Adrián is a designer who studied industrial design and graphic design, and is a graduate with a specialisation in landscape studies (UDP, Santiago). Based on a collaborative and interdisciplinary working methodology, he practices design as a flexible disciplinary field that allows him to adapt to the requirements presented by each project and team he is involved with. He works in multiple contexts, from the design of furniture to architecture and from publishing to printed matter. He has collaborated with Sebastian Errázuriz Studio (2010, New York, USA); participated in the Reconfiguring Venice workshop (2011, IUAV, Venice); worked at Quality Services – CONAF (2014-2017, Santiago, Chile); and co-founded Casa en Blanco publishing house and art factory (2014, Santiago, Chile). Dedicated to this project, Adrián has been running its design area and participating in art book fairs, most recently Miss Read Berlin (Berlin, 2018) and Impresionante (Santiago, 2016-18).

https://aqr.cargo.site/

Berta Ferrer

The focus of Berta’s artistic practice is the use of creative experimentation as a research method, as a way to understand the book as a physical object and to delve into the processes generated by the turning of the page and the relationships established between writer, designer and reader.

Considering the notion that meaning in a text is created through interaction between author-reader, her practice examines the creative possibilities of that communication process and to what degree it can be altered and influenced through the physical reading medium. By deconstructing the object and working with the three fundamental elements that define it (pages, covers and binding), the practical experiments aim to discover and understand ways to activate the physical structure and to reshape the turning of the page and the movement contained within the book as the indissoluble part of storytelling.

blancosobrepapel.com

Corinne Thiessen

Corinne Thiessen is a Canadian multidisciplinary artist born in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She holds an MFA from the University of Lethbridge. Corinne is curious about human social activity, self-regulation and social control. Through kinetic objects, drawing, video and performance, she explores physical and ideological impediments, repression and “acting out.” Meditations on Sisyphus and the absurd offer alternative conceptions of success, and attendant capitalist expectations surrounding productivity and efficiency. 
 
Inspired by the social and sexual behaviour of bonobos, her book We Came Down From the Trees and We Did This: The Graphic Observations of an Anthro-Hack is a collection of comics and “unprofessional” field notes to resist slut-shaming and reinterpret promiscuity. 

https://www.corinnethiessen.ca/

Dorte Gottlieb

Dorte is a freelance graphic designer and illustrator with a strong interest in artist’s books. She hold a Bachelor’s degree in Visual Communication from KADK, Copenhagen (2017). Prior to degree study she focussed on painting, illustration, journalism and creative writing. Time spent in Berlin exposed her to Zine and DIY communities, which inspire and influence her practice.

Dorte’s approach to making books is hands-on: using a copy-machine, being spontaneous with texts and imagery, creating her own small publications that dig deep into a personal / psychological theme or expression. By combining colour combinations, collages, pieces of conversations, texts she has collected in her phone etc. she works intuitively with varying types of information, bringing these together like a stream of consciousness. 

https://dortegl.se/bookmaking/

Emily Fong

Passionate about interconnectivity and the structures of life itself, Emily is an artist on an active search for beauty and equilibrium. Her practice is underpinned by observation, and communication of the life cycles of living things; growth, mortality and change from the micro to the macro. Through the mediums of drawing, painting, sculpture and writing she seeks to examine the embodiment of emotion and the experience of living in a human container with the aim of highlighting our similarities to one another and to other species that occupy the same planet. Emily has a Bachelor of Architecture and is currently working as Artist-in-Residence at the Centre for Regenerative Medicine in Edinburgh; exploring art-science collaboration as a model for public engagement. She is training to observe the world at a microscopic scale and developing methods to use her practice to amplify the beauty and significance of the tiniest encounter. 

www.emilyfongstudio.com

Fernanda Aránguiz M.

Fernanda is a visual artist who writes and makes books. She holds a Bachelor of Art from the Universidad Católica de Chile. Through the publication of formats, mechanisms and materials determined by texts that she produces and edits, she investigates the contraposition between the real and the possible. Recent publications include: OTRAS MAREAS TAMBIÉN SUBEN (2019); Ñamen. Desaparecer, venir en olvido (2018); Some day in life (2018); 2nd edition of La Nada o El Infinito (2017), part of the Artists’ Books and Editions’ Collection of Fundação Serralves (Porto, Portugal); the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection (Chicago, USA). Along with Naranja Ediciones, her work has been presented in several art book fairs such as CODEX VII (2019), the Chicago Art Book Fair (2017) and Tijuana Porto (2016). Fernanda was an exhibitor at Impresionante, Santiago, Chile, (2017, 2018).

https://cargocollective.com/fernandaaranguiz

Leah Anderson

Leah Anderson received training in ceramics during her undergraduate visual art studies. She has continued working with ceramics and understands her involvement with the medium as an essential mode of critical reflection crucial to the ecology of her artistic practice.

Since completing her Masters studies in Art in Public Spheres, Leah’s practice has evolved from questions issuing from her thesis research: learning and the use of tacit knowledge, crafting and the body as archive, and the spectrum between the unique and the copy. She is currently considering the ways both publication and exhibition practice require the curating of physical space. Her practice is expanding towards concerns for the performative in terms of experimental reading and writing, working with hacked and broken forms of (cultural) mimesis, and the use of sequence and repetition in contemporary narrative practices.

www.leahandersonart.com

Mary Lilith Fischer

Mary Lilith Fischer lives and works in Berlin. After graduating from Oberlin College, USA she returned to Berlin to open her own project space and gallery, The Workshop on Forster. Mary’s own practice can best be described as audio-visual poetry: an attempt to combine her writing, video and music.

http://www.workshop-on-forster.de/

Scott Northrup

Scott Northrup is a Detroit-based interdisciplinary artist, writer, curator, and educator. He has exhibited with museums, galleries, film and design festivals, and alternative spaces. He holds an MA in Media Studies from The New School (’03) and a BFA in Fine Arts from College for Creative Studies (‘92) where he currently teaches filmmaking and multidisciplinary studios.

“I am most-interested in the feelings that we secretly harbor for one another, the ephemerality of love, lust, loss, and desire and the artifacts that we pin them to. I make mixed- and multimedia works that sample popular culture and personal history, functioning as altars, character studies, love letters, self-portraits and zines. The zine format might be the ideal vehicle for my work as it feels special, or at least intimate, while remaining common, cheap, vernacular.”

https://scottnorthrup.com/home.html