The book The Voices of the Pages, edited by Caroline Gatt, is a collection of experimental pieces incorporating writing, handwriting, drawing, photography, photocopying, marbling and other print technologies. This book is dedicated to making explicit, and explicitly exploring, the different forms of collaborations between the contributors to the book, and to include the composition and sharing of a book within the process of the joint work. Each collaborating team composed a contribution for this book which in some way incorporates the way of knowing proper to their collaborative work. The process involved in making this book was motivated by the desire to shape a particular relationship with the reader, how we want the voices in this book to be heard and engaged with.
An Unfinished Compendium of Materials
Edited by Rachel J. Harkness
The contributors to An Unfinished Compendium of Materials are in many cases members of the KFI project: anthropologists, architects, choreographers, dancers, artists, and many people who work between and across a good number of disciplines and practices. Others include a number of the guests of and visitors to the project between 2013 and 2017, and importantly, also people that the project members have worked with in the course of their KFI research. The contributions themselves respond to a brief – generated within the project’s discussions and activities – of speaking to the themes of traces, materials and future-making. As such, the book itself traces some of the themes of the project and connections between people, places, topics of interest, and moves beyond them, out into the world. The original invitation for contributions was consciously open in terms of format, in order to allow for experimentation and a creativity that might reflect the project’s interdisciplinary context and make-up, and though contributors were asked to focus on a particular material, the interpretations of that focus vary widely. It is hoped that this variety, coupled with the unfinishedness of the Compendium, will speak to the simple fact that investigation, knowledge and understanding of the world around us takes many forms, as can its representation and communication. What unites the entries in the Compendium is the idea that knowledge grows from our practical and observational engagement with the world around us. It comes from thinking with, from and through beings and things, not just about them. Finally, with the wider project, the overall aim is to show how research underpinned by this premise could make a difference to the sustainability of environmental relations and to the well-being that depends on it.
Sometimes one’s best ideas come not from following the main lines of an investigation but from veering off course, in brief encounters with things, artworks and people that trigger reflections on quite unfamiliar and unexpected topics. This gives them a certain freshness, for they have yet to be burdened by subsequent elaboration. But they are also conveyed with the kind of care and attention that, in the past, we used to put into writing letters to one another. Corresponding with people and things – as in letter-writing – opens paths for lives to carry on, each in its own way but nevertheless with regard for others. In this little book I have assembled a series of correspondences, all of which have taken place over the last five years or so. They can be understood as attempts to forge a way of thinking about how we come to know things, not through engineering a confrontation between theories in the head and facts on the ground, but rather through joining with the things themselves, in the very processes of thought. The mini-essays essays assembled here, crossing the disciplines of anthropology, art, architecture and design, all exemplify this aim in one way or another. I have grouped them into four parts, addressing the themes, respectively, of matter, world, lines and words, and have written a separate introduction to each part. In a fifth and final part, I bring together the transcribed texts of three conversations which range over some of the same themes.
