Having been aware of Eva Weinmayr as an artist who is also interested in publishing, albeit from a different angle than I am, and having encountered her in Gothenburg in October 2022 during the Ecologies of Art Publishing conference, I was pleasantly surprised to be invited to take part in a workshop in Brussels organised by her and Femke Snelting as part of their Ecologies of Dissemination research project.
A key question behind the workshop was how to deal with issues of cultural appropriation, power differences and the limits of conventional citation and acknowledgement. The space within which the workshop was held was designed in collaboration with artist Flo*Souad Benaddi and included a series of prompts (by Erri Ammonita, Bye Bye Binary, Séverine Dusollier, Andrea Francke, Gary Hall, Jennifer Hayashida, Cathryn Klasto, Nkule Mabaso, Nicolas Malevé, Erri Ammonita, Dubravka Sekulić, Winnie Soon, Christopher Ba Thi Nguyen, Marloes van der Valk and Stephen Wright).
Together these prompt were offered as entry points to start to revisit the Collective Conditions for Reuse (CC4r) document, which had been developed in previous years by members of Constant, the organisation run by Femke in whose space the workshop took place. As the two days of collective thinking, playing, editing, and eating evolved, the language of the document at hand was tackled from multiple angles and a wide range of approaches were offered – from poetic to practical – all of which suggested a move away from the more legal language so often embedded in documents that engage with notions of permission, however open they may want to be. Again, a lot of food for thought, and an excellent experience of ‘trusting the process’ rather than try and work towards clear ‘solutions’.
Gerrie van Noord 