S&D#024 / APE#202. - Hollis, Edward; van der Werf, Adriënne; Dumoulin, Joachim; de Jonge, Katinka; Dietrich, Maira; Kneebone, Mathew; The Serving Library; Van Imschoot, Tom (Gent : ART PAPER EDITIONS, 2022)
This book is an archive of past realizations and future possibilities, a mix of memories and dreams to visualize the collective present in 019, a post-industrial space for art, graphic design and architecture in Ghent, Belgium. It started with this playful idea of trying to invent projects ahead of us and present them as if they are already realized, as if our future already belongs to our past. We liked to poke fun at the petrifying mass of expectations we increasingly felt surrounded by in looking for a sustainable practice, having to know in advance what we were up to while our creativity had always entailed adapting to surprise. But then the pandemic came, imprisoning us into a present that felt surreal because of the way it made the world into a place we could no longer share, unless as a negative space of shared disaster. And so, the original idea started to shift. How to imagine a shared future? How to surpass the compressed space of our present, if it leaves no room to imagine the future differently than as the reality of a catastrophe already taking place? How to turn our collective past into a resource of future survival? This book is not an anthology of former successes and future flowering to be expected. It’s a survival guide exploring the future along fictive paths while reconfiguring the past we have so far documented. It’s a shortcut to our archive as a reservoir of reinvention. If you dig through the layers of the collective past we have recovered, you will find a heterogeneous crust of words and images about to burst open, an island in the making, featuring the flagpole of multiple artists, unlocking the future as if it is already present. [provided by publisher]
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