Prospections

Notes from the Table. A Not-Yet Manifesto, 2022, digital rendering of an imagined expanded cinema installation, which is intended to include two overhead projectors, nine transparency sheets, and no less than three fine tip dry erase markers. Conceived and realized by Zone Collective together with their long-term design collaborator Karoline Świeżyński.

Since its beginnings in 2016, Zone Collective (Megan Hoetger and Kirila Cvetkovska) has been developing a method of collective annotation built around friendship and their on-the-ground practice of sitting together in archives. What began as a pragmatic pooling of their resources quickly became a working proposition, moving toward a notion of research that rejects models of individual mastery, singular voice, and scholarly territorialism. Instead, the collective puts emphases on the always-already-shared nature of research processes and on workshopping as a primary site of knowledge production. Since 2021, they have been exploring possibilities for extending their collective annotation method to include others’ voices, taking up forms of expanded cinema, performance lecture, and, most recently, theater workshop to do so. In the process, they have been stretching what the meaning of annotation could be.

Notes from the Table. A Not-Yet Manifesto (2022) takes as its point of inspiration a circuit-board-like diagram drawn in 1990 by Ivan Paić, co-founder of the Multimedia Center, Student Center Zagreb (MM Center). Founded in 1976 and led initially by Hrvoje Turković with Ivan Ladislav Galeta and Ivan Paić joining consecutively in 1977 and 1978, the MM Center was a hub for experimental media and performance within the framework of the Student Center cultural department. Mapping the interconnectedness of cultural activities and economic means, Paić’s circuit-board-like diagram provides a model for thinking about the terms of, as well as relations between, aesthetic production, social action, and public presentation. The networked choreographies his drawing-model proposes have long held a vital place in Zone Collective’s spatial and dramaturgical imaginary. With Notes from the Table. A Not-Yet Manifesto, Zone Collective reconfigures the drawing to see what it might offer for articulating the entanglements of critical praxis, memory politics, and material conditions.