Publication introduction

We live in a time of pervasive violence, manifesting in wars, economic and environmental exploitation, and marginalization of vulnerable groups, to name a few. Divisive rhetorics, aiming to weaken existing or emerging solidarities, are just as pervasive. Arts and culture, too, face numerous risks, including being co-opted to support dominant narratives or discredited as irrelevant to urgent struggles. Yet, it is precisely within this landscape that they hold transformative potential – not only to resist but also to rearticulate and reimagine modes of engagement and response, whether in relation to narratives of the past or present.

Within Moving Narratives, as we engaged with narrative-driven practices – both as creative processes and critical discourse – one aspect that particularly resonated with me was the exploration of how place, voice, archives, and lived experiences shape and influence artistic interventions and responses. As mentor of the program’s Publication Chapter, I was especially interested in exploring how publications serve as spaces to engage with such themes. Particularly, when considering that across disciplines, publications have often acted as sites where meanings of worth, truth, documentation, resistance, and complacency are contested, negotiated, and reimagined. This role remains pertinent today, amidst political, economic, and information ecosystems increasingly seeking to commodify narratives, limit their scope, render them irrelevant, or simply make us forget.  

Moving Narratives has been envisioned to serve as one site of such inquiries. Over the past year, it brought together a group of artists and cultural practitioners to explore further, learn, and share how their practices counter dominant narratives. Many of the issues they investigate and engage with highlight the interplay of colonial legacies and ongoing erasures, particularly in relation to suppressed histories, memories, identities, labour, and beyond.

Through diverse mediums and modes of expression, the artists’ research and interventions often converge on retrieving, recognizing or rewriting narratives – whether personal or collective.  

So when we began discussing this publication, I invited the cohort to think about our joint publication’s life – its versatility and potential for enduring presence. This led us to the question of travel: How can we ensure that the narratives and stories travel both as a tangible medium of paper and as a body of ideas?  

This inquiry brought to mind Stuart Hall’s concept of culture on “routes.” As a cultural theorist, Hall, who offers critical insights into the intersection of culture, politics, identity, and power, challenged the notion of culture as a retreat to cultural homogeneity or “roots.” Instead, he argues that “the past is being transformed before our eyes” and posits to understand culture as “the various routes by which people travel, culture travels, cultures moves, culture changes, cultures migrate ….”  

This publication, as a cultural text in itself, draws inspiration from Hall’s concept of routes. Its pages embrace movement in a way that the publication remains a record of open-ended processes, reflecting how narratives are made and remade, offering a space to destabilize and pose questions repeatedly.

Echoing the program’s broader aims, this publication seeks to highlight that reexamining histories of oppression, resistance, and transformation are processes evolving and never fully concluded.

The publication’s formats have been thought of with the hope that they embody the idea of narratives in flux while recognizing that knowledge is also produced within the intricacies of the everyday, as the fellows’ practices themselves show.  

That is why, the conversation format in this publication holds a distinctive place. The fellows spoke to one another about how questions tackled in the program’s lectures tie into their practice-based experiences. The three theme-based conversations explore: (1) the ethics behind immersive storytelling, in particular when it comes to the representation of vulnerable or marginalized communities; (2) how to navigate from practices that seek merely to expose systematic and structural injustices to those that seek to heal; and (3) how can contemporary art move beyond depicting crisis to actively engaging with – and transforming – the systems that produce those crises.  

Yet, like any other form of collective-based sharing, these conversations move beyond mere exchange. They locate the fellows’ processes, offer a new space to understand their contexts, point to connections in and beyond fields and geographies, and capture the immediacy of thought and the relational dynamics between them. Ultimately, these conversations also speak to the new friendships and relatabilities that have emerged and formed within the program – relationships based on curiosity, care, and solidarity. Such connections formed early on, and the Moving (pieces of) Narratives is an example of this. Initiated during our first in-person meeting in Lab Week Amsterdam (April 2024), it began as an experimental, collaborative project among the fellows themselves, as they decided to mail each other fragments of their everyday lives and contexts – reading excerpts, postcards, works from other artists friends, and more. This travelling archive quickly faced logistical challenges, reconfirming how borders regulate not only human movement and material objects – but, with them, also attempt to control the flow of narratives and affect. 

Yet, for the Moving (pieces of) Narratives, new routes were imagined and created: relying on friends and acquaintances or safeguarding pieces to share in-person at some later time. These reimaginings speak to more than mere adaptability in the face of constraint; they highlight the importance of resisting by reimagining and reinventing routes outside and beyond those ascribed as official means of exchange.

As we’ve recorded images and stories of these pieces in a poster – as a “movable” format itself – we hope it continues to serve as a travelling archive amongst the fellows, with the pieces here opening up new routes and avenues of knowledge and exchange among others as well. 

Similar perseverance of reimaginings resonates throughout the different practices of the fellows, fragments of which are laid out in their personal pages. Some have shared their practices as documentation, some as ongoing processes or projects, others as reflections on their personal or collective[1]based practices – each offering routes for us to immerse in their contexts and work. 

Dispersed throughout the publication are also the fellows’ gifts. These pages attempt to recreate some part of the experience of the cohort’s first in-person meeting, where fellows shared aspects of their practices as gifts. In that meeting, they gifted to one another. In this publication, they gift fragments of their practices or snippets of their memories to the reader. They are removable, to allow for them to be repurposed by readers, along new routes. This, too, speaks to this publication’s envisioned life – one based on its potential to lead to new sharings, new learnings, through continuous reuse and reinterpretations. 

This brings me to our contemporary.

This publication’s premise was built around concepts of moving and shifting narratives, approaching knowledge and learning as produced through theory and practice, and applying such principles into the publication’s life. These three themes – shifts, knowledge, life – cannot be detached from the ongoing oppression, killing, and erasure of Palestinian lives by the Israeli state. 

Given this, the fellows have compiled a guide with links and references in solidarity with Gaza, one that not only highlights initiatives in support of Palestinian lives and voices, but also documents oppression, highlights collective responsibility of artists and cultural workers to contribute to resistance, and supports efforts for liberation through art, storytelling, and activism. 

As they note: “It seemed an impossible thought for us to put out this publication without Gaza, without its lessons, without its defenders. Beyond a nod, an ode, a gesture, we thought to compile something more operative, a resource, a guide. So we put together a modest collection of diverse initiatives for those who might still not have found a way to be in solidarity with Gaza.” 

Ultimately, I believe this is one way solidarity works – not always knowing a way is fine, but ensuring there are avenues to learn from is essential. That is why documentation is not merely a record but a form of solidarity itself. We hope our publication serves as one such site, moving narratives and opening new routes of engagement.