A blog-ish carrier bag assemblage

writing, again

A scene from my studio in Pawtucket, RI in 2019. I was assembling Queer.Archive.Work #3, getting ready to take 175 copies to the NY Art Book Fair.

It feels so good to be writing again. I mean, I never stopped writing, but doing it publicly like this feels different now, especially post-twitter (and post-blogging, post everything).

A Kaliflower board. These were put up in communes all over San Francisco from 1969–72, as a way to share the Kaliflower newsletter, which was printed by the Free Print Shop (founded by Irving Rosenthal) and delivered and clipped to the board. Messages could be left in the little tube at the bottom, which would be picked up and brought back to the publisher.

A long time ago, years before I started teaching, I needed to take a break from client work, and declared it a sabbatical. I left the clients behind, left the country, and tried to turn more fully towards my own needs. The word sabbatical comes from sabbat, to rest. I started blogging on soulellis.com as I traveled and did my first-ever residency, and wrote “in public” almost daily, before I had the language to name these ideas, like publishing as an artistic practice or making public. I wasn’t even calling myself an artist at the time, but that sabbatical 13 years ago became a definitive moment to try it out—could I dare make things on my own, for myself? It was a brief, blissful pause from the transactional grind of commercial work, accommodation, and compromise. Along the way I found out that attending to one’s own needs can be a beautiful way to be open, to see all around, and to connect deeply with others.

“In these troubling times, how can we not trouble time?”

Now, I see this coming year away from teaching—an actual academic sabbatical—as more of a re-set than a rest. It’s a return to work. Attending to my needs, my work, my practice, which I’ve missed terribly, especially in these last three years while I was consumed with more communal work, helping to organize Queer.Archive.Work and heading up the department of graphic design at RISD.

Generous gestures

I’m framing this new place, this blog-ish “carrier bag assemblage” of posts, with the imperfect title survival by sharing. It’s a borrowed three-word phrase that I return to again and again to describe a kind of methodology, inspired by and situated in relation to ongoing, non-linear trajectories of publishing practices. These are interconnected figures, fragments, images, and stories that communicate across time and space through gestures of radical generosity and tenderness; I’m sure I’ll write about them in future posts. I use the phrase “survival by sharing” to approach my own never-ending desire to establish real contact with these queer ancestors, searching for others, before us, embedded within us, who lit up their own networks of community-making and publics-forming. I use “survival by sharing” as a way to confront rupture and conjure the reparative energy that’s needed when working and moving through queer archives. And so this is how I’m hoping to spend the coming year: making work that’s inspired by entanglement, time travel, embeddedness, superposition, and other quantum ideas, exploring archival justice, queer typography and design, radical publishing, and image-making. I’m not sure what form any of this will take, and I’ll probably just try things out here as I go. My hope is that this blog might be a much-needed risky space for experiments, growth, and connection, maybe sometimes inconsistent, never predictable, hopefully always authentic. Thanks for the company.