In 2015, the Frans Masereel Centre started a collaboration with Geys to publish parts of his archive. The first archive publication, Archief 1 and Archief 2, consists of two thick volumes in A4 format with more than 800 scanned archive documents, and appeared on the occasion of Geys’s solo exhibition in the SMAK in 2015. The material was presented as it was, without any explanation or hierarchy.

Archief 4 (2017) begins with a detailed index of Geys’ archive, a complete station novel with annotations by Geys, and continues with documents relating to cultural subsidies and correspondence concerning the foundation of an association for visual artists who fought in the early seventies for a social status for visual artists.

An animation of the contents of the book courtesy of the Frans Masereel Centre can be seen here.

Invitation card produced on the occasion of Manfred Pernice’s exhibition Kassetten/Cassettes II at Kulturkreis der Deutschen Wirtschaft, Berlin, January–December, 2017.

Three volume artist book reproducing avid fan of the Japanese avant-garde, Teruo Nishiyama’s scrapbook. Despite not having personal contacts in the art world, Nishiyama witnessed many of the emerging radical art events and exhibitions of the 60s, including those by the Neo-Dada Organizers and Tokyo Fluxus. He also meticulously documented everything he saw in photographs and copious written notes, as well as by collecting ephemera. He preserved the material he had assembled over the course of two years in a scrapbook album.

The first volume of this new publication depicts the exhibitions Nishiyama attended in Tokyo from 1965 to 1966. In the second volume, Chung and Maeda have attempted to follow Nishiyama’s methods, documenting various exhibitions held in Tokyo from January 17th to February 3rd, 2017. The third volume includes an English translation of the notes in the Nishiyama’s scrapbook, as well as an interview with Nishiyama by Chung and Maeda.

Produced on the occasion of CAConrad’s Mapping Dimensions 27, a multi-part series of writing workshops at: KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Contemporary Art Center (CAC), Vilnius; Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf.

“CAConrad will create a (Soma)tic Poetry Ritual at KW Institute for Contemporary Art based on the work of Ian Wilson. For the two-day workshop he will use handmade maps and a reconfigured version of Jason Dodge’s sculpture A golden lightning rod pointing north to study the many aspects of our planet’s directional points of East and West. He will use these references to explore life and death, as the known and the unknown forces of our world and how these directional archetypes help and hinder our lives. This is a love letter to the Future Wilderness of our world.”

Diagrammatic Writing is a poetic demonstration of the capacity of format to produce meaning. The articulation of the codex, as a space of semantically generative relations, has rarely (if ever) been subject to so highly focused and detailed a study. The text and graphical presentation are fully integrated, co-dependent, and mutually self-reflexive.

This small book work should be of interest to writers, bibliographers, designers, conceptual artists, and anyone interested in the meta-language of diagrammatic thought in graphic form.

Johanna Drucker is a writer and book artist known for her work in experimental typography. She has published and lectured widely on topics related to the history of the book, contemporary art, graphic design, and digital aesthetics. She is the Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies in the Information Studies Department at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Poets, activists, writers and artists respond to what it means to be lonely in 2017. Contributors include porn actor Colby Keller, writer Olivia Laing, artist Marc Hundley, librettist Alice Goodman, poet Timothy Thornton, anti-drag performer David Hoyle & many more. Curated by Richard Dodwell.