September Garden Placement

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JENNA COLLINS

Placement does not explain, but cultivates a September garden (2020)

WAP collaboration (ldetails below)

Camden Art Centre
Commission: Public Knowledge Programme

Placement does not explain… abridges the writing of contemporary American poet Rosemarie Waldrop, whose recent appellation ‘gap gardening’ refers to the productive interstices between words, and between worlds.

We Are Publication’s ‘garden’ extends the group’s interest in jointly conducted research and speculative approaches to publishing. Its preliminary ‘groundwork’ took the form of a custom-made newspaper comprising images and texts generated specifically for the purpose of reassemblage by contributors under conditions of lockdown and separation.

As Waldrop suggests, the placement of words (and plants) generates intermedial zones of transformation and potential as much as it might propagate meaning and fixed territories. We Are Publication’s cultivation of such border zones includes amongst others 1980s pop chanteuse Elkie Brookes, cuttings specialist William Burroughs and an errant Cottingley fairy, each recast as unlikely gardeners within an expansive domain undergoing repeated sonic and visual disturbance.

We Art Publication (WAP)

2015 - 2025

Full details at
www.wearepublication.com

The artists group We Are Publication (WAP) embraces an open and unbound notion of what it means to publish. Collage, cut-up and fragmentation are WAP’s central modes of operation which allow the group to explore multi-form, poly-vocal and durational publications comprising sound, video, posters, sculptural forms, carpets, immersive media, broadcast, performance and printed matter. As such, WAP’s activities form assemblages of encounters and materials that test out and expand what it means to make public.

We Are Publication has produced speculative publications including a radio broadcast and vinyl record Diagram of an Hour (Resonance FM, London, 2016, Curved Pressing, 2017); a handmade rug Notes on a Carpet (Five Years, London, Focal Point Gallery’s Unit Twenty-One, Southend-on- Sea and the London Art Book Fair, Whitechapel Gallery 2017–2018); the exhibition We.Are.Cut.Up. (Pratt Institute, New York and Radiophrenia, CCA Glasgow 2019); and t h e H O L D took place at the Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston, an exhibition accompanied by a series of live events. Recent video work, Placement does not explain, but cultivates a September garden formed part of London’s Camden Arts Centre, Public Knowledgeprogramme in September 2020, and a print iteration from 2021 was published as an article in KOKO journal.

Core members: Jonathan Allen, Rachel Cattle, Jenna Collins, Volker Eichelmann, John Hughes, Christian Newby, Andrea Stokes