▾ Being an Art Collective, then? Vol.1: Spiral Infrastructures and Sensory Reconfigurations

Editorial Projects

Co-authored & edited with Shin Hara
Zine, 2026
Self-published, Berlin

*Full text available upon request.

Being an Art Collective, then? Vol.1: Spiral Infrastructures and Sensory Reconfigurations is the first issue of an ongoing editorial project examining collective artistic practice not as a stable identity but as an infrastructural condition. Rather than asking what a collective is, the publication asks under what circumstances collective work becomes possible, sustainable, or fragile.

Developed through long-term collaboration, study sessions, and correspondence between the editors, the zine proposes “spiral infrastructures” as a conceptual lens for understanding collective formation. Unlike linear models of growth or rupture, the spiral suggests recursive movement: practices return, shift, accumulate, and transform over time. Collective work, in this sense, is not built upon fixed foundations but emerges through uneven rhythms of labour, care, misalignment, and renewal.

The publication brings together essays, dialogical fragments, visual materials, and reflective notes that trace how sensory and affective conditions—fatigue, hesitation, shared attention, partial support—shape collaborative structures. By foregrounding the embodied and perceptual dimensions of working together, the project situates collectivity within material and institutional constraints rather than romanticised notions of solidarity.

Positioned between research, curatorial thinking, and editorial experimentation, the zine treats publishing itself as a collective method. Writing becomes a space for testing language, revising assumptions, and documenting the recursive dynamics of shared practice. In doing so, Being an Art Collective, then? expands the discourse on contemporary art collectives beyond representation or organisational form, proposing instead that collectivity is an ongoing negotiation with infrastructural, temporal, and sensory conditions.

The first volume thus establishes an editorial platform for sustained inquiry into how collective artistic practice can persist, transform, and reconfigure itself within shifting institutional and technological landscapes.