Dear _____________
This is to let you know that we’ve finally made time to sit around a table at Five Years, and spend the day looking through the material collected after the symposium during the Summer. To begin again.
This discussion event should only be regarded as part of an ongoing correspondence. While it may not be possible for you to attend in person on Sunday, please accept our invitation to participate.
Either by suggesting prompts (e.g. questions for discussion, see left hand page) or by attending, commenting on future events.
Prompts might be:
books, films, assemblies, posters, meetings, conversations, correspondences, photographs, scribbles, websites, footnotes, appendices, indices, of recordings, on-line and printed publications, announcements, workshop events, call outs, responses, asides, ephemera and contests/encounters. Anything that plays out, takes a/part, interrupts the correspondence.
As agreed, or at least outlined in our proposal –Drawing Research Network, (post Drawing Articulations: A Radical Drawing Symposium hosted by Leeds School of Arts, Leeds Beckett University. 26 June 2024)., this means that all the drawings have been collated as black & white facsimiles into a bound book form and will be viewed, read, alongside their ‘originals’.
The first draft exists now only as a single copy for reflective discussion. One of an array of objects and prompts operating as a way for us to draw. A shared articulation of questions raised between ‘us’ as the risk involved in constituting any ‘collectivity’ ‘community’ ‘drawing’ and indeed ‘publication’.
What the collective interplay of giving and receiving, anonymous or otherwise, actually makes, still remains to be seen. Drawing and study as verb and noun. Process and result. To begin again. Researching as a working and unworking.
So this is a proposal. A staging of material gathered for reading.
For opening a place of the form to be drawn out by anyone who wants to pursue their own adventure.
A publishing project which sets out to disclose, discover its own methods of making.
Making public. Making in public. Drawing a correspondence between making, seeing, listening, speaking, reading.
Anyway. As a project in process. Let’s see how it goes.
Please pass this on to anyone who might be interested, and even available to join us.
Participants who handed in their drawing at the symposium, and want to make contact, please do so at: info@fiveyears.org.uk
All the best
from
Five Years:
drawing correspondence
Five Years. Two Study Groups. Part One.
drawing correspondence
20 October 2024
Sun 12-6pm
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This is a proposal calling on anyone interested in discussing Five Years: drawing correspondence project at Five Years. Interested in thinking about how this particular project might operate as a possible study group for discussing how anyone can take part in the drafting, developing, and making of publications.
Five Years: drawing correspondence project
Initially, a collaborative project, exhibition and discursive event at Five Years, London in 2024, by Five Years member Ilga Leimanis as an invitation to Five Years members.
Then as a proposal of participation in response to a call for papers for: Drawing Research Network, (post Drawing Articulations: A Radical Drawing Symposium hosted by Leeds School of Arts, Leeds Beckett University. 26 June 2024).
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How to place as a study group?
In particular how to work with material collected through participation at the symposium and what it might mean for future drawing research?
This is the first time that this material will have been looked at since the Summer.
A single bound black and white facsimile of the drawings has been printed as agreed. A draft proof. As yet unviewed.To be discarded?
How to incorporate into a/ as study? (noun,verb)
Can this project work as a study group?
Five Years: drawing correspondence project’s possible working relationship with the Drawing Research Network, as some kind of drawing research study group?
What might that be?
The drawing correspondence was proposed in parts. Symposium participants (anyone attending), were invited to engage in a collective interplay of giving and receiving. By bringing their own vocabulary of mark-making, they were asked to share, gift and draw with others into, and contributing anonymously, to a loose leaf series of 100 drawings that would operate and distribute into all areas of the symposium. With the understanding that there would be a further call to publish.
This an oportunity to simply look at material collected through participation at the symposium and what it might mean for future drawing research.
How to propose to work with, publish material? What might 'our research' be?
The proposed intervention in the symposium was a way for 'us' to draw a shared articulation of ‘gift’, that questioned our understanding of the risk involved in constituting any ‘collectivity’ ‘community’ and ‘drawing’.
How did/ does that work?
How might this be made possible?
For those who participated?
And the you and I, and everyone else who didn’t?
Anyway.
This is a reopening of the envelopes.Here are some sketchy questions for discussion (please contact to add/ amend/erase etc) *
How, what, who would constitute this involvement?
What would it do?
What is a drawing publication?
What is a publication?
Why open up participation in an already opened project?
Open to anyone? How might this work?
How to work with material already collected through participation at a past event/ symposium?
How do ideas (radical or otherwise) of ‘drawing’, ‘publication’, ‘research’, ‘Five Years’, ‘university’ ‘network,’ ‘community,’ correspond?
How/Why is this a concern?
For those who participated?
For everyone else who didn’t?
What is a public? A reader? A viewer?
So who and what can and cannot take part?
How/Is it possible to work collaboratively without hierarchy?
How do we dissent without falling apart?
Is collaboration something that happens in the space between individuals?
Is it a property of space or context or is it a connective tissue between bodies?
Is it possible to collaborate anonymously, in a way that allows everyone to benefit equally?
Drawing as experimentation with processes of editorial assemblage?
How does this project change the quality or character of the experiences we share together in making?
Where is the drawing, the research in this? In the discussion?
The decision-making?
The attempt to make evident durational editing processes?
Or the bits and pieces, ephemera, overlooked aspects of inquiry, acted out in/by public demand?
A series of publishable artefacts and discursive opportunities for encouraging cross-fertilisation of ideas and methodologies that foster collaborations between artists, researchers, specialist, experts, academics, and…
well, anyone?
Please contribute any questions to info@fiveyears.org.uk
All correspondences will be presented. All rights reserved.
Still interested?
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Five Years:
Unit 2B1 Boothby Road, Archway, London, N19 4AJ
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