Samlande tankar

Samlande tankar/Collecting Thoughts was a three-year project, 2021–24, supported by the Swedish Arts Council, coordinated and organized by Grafikens Hus, to research and explore print and graphic collections in Sweden and internationally through a postcolonial and intersectional perspective. Together with artists, researchers, museum directors, collection keepers, and other experts, Grafikens Hus initiated a process of meetings, workshops, discussions, and visits to art collections to investigate and formulate a vision for how a museum, like Grafikens Hus, can build a new kind of collection—one that takes into consideration situated collecting histories, critical and postcolonial theory, community agency and care, and accessibility.

The visual identity we developed was based on the idea of traces: reading archival traces to uncover layers of symbolic-discursive significations and contexts; sifting through the leftover traces and remnants of the burnt collection; noticing the traces and ghostly imprints left in the print workshop on screens, lithography stones, metal plates, letterpress test prints, under the glass of the ink mixing table, on the fabric of the etching press. The collection is an assemblage of traces, each work in a collection opening onto an entangling mess of material, signification, and culture-specific contexts, institutions, histories, and relations.

A shifting assemblage of traces was applied across various printed matter, digital communication, artist talks and performances, and a series of publications that documented the process, learnings, and contributions from artists in residence for each year.

Eight years after Grafikens Hus’ premises and print collection burned down in 2014, the Samlande tankar/Collecting Thoughts project was not simply about the restoration and preservation of their printmaking collection, but rather had the ambitions to fundamentally unlearn, reimagine, and materialize otherwise what a printmaking and contemporary art collection is and what it does—its ethics, aesthetics, responsibilities; its dispositions and relations toward/for/with different communities and publics; and its material and labor conditions of custodial/post-custodial/inter-institutional maintenance and care.

It debated what a museum and institution such as Grafikens Hus is, who they serve, work with, and with what methods, prefiguring new ways of public (social, cultural, and political) engagement through art, visual literacy, and hands-on workshops and dialogues with print practices, redrawing the field of printmaking in Sweden, and re-situating the ways Grafikens Hus understands the role of graphic arts in the present.

In the second year of the project, Johnny Chang was invited to participate as a two year artist in residence. He conducted an artistic research titled Living With Images, which examined the politics and ethics of collecting and gathering amid struggle, seeking tactics for gathering print and gathering around the stories they retell to attend to individual and collective conditions of our times.

He visited archives and libraries, and met with activists and practitioners to discuss how they gather and make materials accessible from different contexts of and relations to struggle. Seeking voices from below, those counter-institutions and critical practices that recognized and actively worked against coloniality, racism, and ableism, he visited and met with: Arab Image Foundation in Beirut, The Freedom Archives in Berkeley, Kearny Street Workshop in San Francisco, the Bishopsgate Institute Archives, 56A Infoshop, MayDay Rooms, and the Stuart Hall Library in London, the Nylon Cheng Liberty Foundation and Memorial Museum and the Print and Carve Department block print collective in Taipei, Açık Radyo and BAS in Istanbul, and Memory of the World. What conditions do their practices emerge from? With what tactics do they collect, care for, and organize access to materials?

Throughout the residency, he also organized and participated in reading circles touching upon aesthetics, access, and the politics and ethics of reuse. He met and carved with the Taiwan based Print and Carve Department block printing collective. He gave a performance lecture in June 2023 in the library at Hägerstensåsens Medborgarhus, sharing initial research findings in collaboration with MayDay Rooms and A Movement to Hold. In collaboration with Medborgarhus co-artistic director Elof Helström, they hosted the workshop a people’s library, a mess of support structures, with OEI and members from Interference Archive and other initiatives joining in. In conversation with process leader Macarena Dusant, they published the text An Anti-racist Mixtape for the archives issue of the Malmö based anti-racist magazine Mana. He also published the text Gathering Notes (Language is Also a Place of Struggle) in the #104–105 OEI issue on organizing.

In collaboration with Macarena, researcher René León Rosales of Mångkulturellt centrum, and Black Archives Sweden, they hosted a film screening and discussion of Genklang (Reverberations), a short film portrait of Megafonen by René and artist Behzad Khosravi Noor. At The Art of Convivality Memory Studies Nordic Biannual conference in Malmö this October, he moderated a panel discussing community archives titled Communities Gathering: Rereading Pasts, Reimagining Futures with organizers Jenny Nguyen, Mamak Babak-Rad, Yahia Saleh, and René, and presented the artwork Moving Heaven and Earth, consisting of a spatial installation, ink prints on cardboard, riso printed leaflets, and a 30 minute sound work sharing stories around food that hold both joy and struggle from the Asian diaspora. He also held two internal workshops with Grafikens Hus to support their work in developing a new catalog structure for their collection and archive, focusing on finding aids and narrative agency.