As part of Speelplaats, a parallel program of Werkplaats Typografie, participants challenged what was being offered in the school’s curriculum by introducing improvements or suggesting alternatives. Reader, aantekeningen exemplaar brings together these contributions made to the Speelplaats program alongside other like-minded initiatives by participants, guests and tutors in the shape of examples as well as reference texts and other materials. The reader borrows its title from an annotated copy of the catalogue Ruimtelijk Werk (1983), found in the library of Werkplaats Typografie, in which Wigger Bierma had penciled down what could have been done more consistently or what was lacking in his original design.

The Griefers of Bandung, a novella written by 14 authors. A gripping romantic fantasy shifting with fiendish aplomb between characters and voices, perspectives and plotlines. ‘Elsemieke has just spent the last three months in Bandung, searching for love and fighting alongside a local activist collective. Meanwhile, her virtual avatar Virgo has become a resistance hero involved in weapons-trafficking, corporate-boycotts, rally-organising, illegal-fundraising and cybertheft. It turns out the effects of these operations are not limited to cyberspace.’

Wishing to capture the sun while facing the impossibility of doing so with a standard camera Chantal van Rijt used the basics of photography and the eye itself to cause a projection. This tactile publication brings together multiple layers, showing parts of the surroundings in each image. In the shadows of the shining sun the process and the maker are present. The sun makes this all visible, even though in the image the sun is only a white spot where the pixels are burned out.

From colonial history to ecology, and from public space to colouring outside the lines: each Karbon Arnhem File publication highlights a particular issue. In the process, artists, writers, researchers, activists, collectives, designers, and many others work closely with the Editorial team. This results in a cacophony of voices asking critical questions about our daily reality. Karbon Arnhem Files is inspired by ruangrupa’s own Karbon magazine, and brings together experimental art and design practices. The whole series consists of six publications.
Language : Dutch

From colonial history to ecology, and from public space to colouring outside the lines: each Karbon Arnhem File publication highlights a particular issue. In the process, artists, writers, researchers, activists, collectives, designers, and many others work closely with the Editorial team. This results in a cacophony of voices asking critical questions about our daily reality. Karbon Arnhem Files is inspired by ruangrupa’s own Karbon magazine, and brings together experimental art and design practices. The whole series consists of six publications and is also available in our shop.
Language: Dutch

From colonial history to ecology, and from public space to colouring outside the lines: each Karbon Arnhem File publication highlights a particular issue. In the process, artists, writers, researchers, activists, collectives, designers, and many others work closely with the Editorial team. This results in a cacophony of voices asking critical questions about our daily reality. Karbon Arnhem Files is inspired by ruangrupa’s own Karbon magazine, and brings together experimental art and design practices. The whole series consists of six publications and is also available in our shop.
Language: Dutch!

This publication is an exercise between performance and documentary photography.
“As a narrative that takes the format of a video projection and a fotonovela (1), Once upon a time… concentrates on the story of Nieding and Hendrikje Wolters, ex-travellers (2) who became notorious in the North of the Netherlands after publishing a book about their own lives, ranging from criminal convictions to evangelic belief (3). With specific attention to performance and documentary practices, a photographic sequence is enveloped within a conversation that attempts to describe what we are seeing in order to problematize what we are not seeing, being facts and fictions equally subjected to speculation. The work is the result of three moments of production. In the first, I work in collaboration with the Wolters on the construction of photographs that document the staging of specific passages in their biography. In a second moment, discarding the use of talking heads or speech bubbles and avoiding moral impositions (often used in fotonovelas) I invite curator Inti Guerrero to enter into a dialogue about the pictures produced. Using the recorded and transcribed version of this conversation as the textual part of the narrative, the third moment of production is further developed with references to theatre scripts, film stills and newspaper reports to the final form of a video projection and a publication.”

DAI PUBLICATIONS is a collection of artist’s books issued by the Dutch Art Institute (DAI) and designed in collaboration with the Werkplaats Typografie (WT). The 2011 edition consists of 16 publications. In close collaboration with one or more guest authors, artists team up with designers to produce an artwork in the form of printed matter. From very diverse perspectives they reflect on publishing as a versatile medium. DAI and WT, both located in Arnhem are Master’s programs of ArtEZ, one of the major arts universities (Hogeschool voor de Kunsten) in the Netherlands. Gabriëlle Schleijpen , head of program at the DAI, founded DAI PUBLICSATIONS in 2003. It began as an experimental and innnovative research and publishing platform aiming to address the specific process of arts books production, it is now an acclaimed editorial project. Since its inception more then 90 artist books have been published. As of 2006 the series is supervised by an annually appointed collection editor; for 2011, visual artist Rebecca Sakoun.

In between Visible/Invisible is a publication published on July 2011, and is based on a project called Invisible City(In between Visible/Invisible), which is a photographic exploration, realized in December 2010. For this publication researcher, writer and documentary maker on civil liberties works Rick Van Amersfoort and researcher, writer Nishant Shah were invited to write a contribution.

Impossible calibrations of an imaginary Sherry is an artist book, it consists out of photographs taken of a miniature model with a darkroom on the left side that connects to an artist studio on the right. The Maquette itself is inhabited by an imaginery version of a person who is dealing with issues that refer to the concept of this book. The book comes with a little magnifier glass to enable the viewer to see more details.

The publication is a reproduction of a painting by Izabela Ołdak in a form of a book. The painting was artist’s diary which had been created in Holland and Poland in a period of one year. The form of the book allows to recreate the paining in new contexts.
It is part of the Publications Project is a collection of artist books issued by the Dutch Art Institute and designed in collaboration with the Werkplaats Typografie.

Shelf Life is a special publication with thoughts and texts and images by Jin Kwang Kim (and Paul Elliman). Jin’s work falls between a twin interest in spirituality, which can refer to the search for meaning in present life, and spiritualism, which often refers to a communication with a non- living spirit world from the past or the future. Both terms are formed by the word spirit, which itself derives from Latin spiritus “breath”, and therefore usually relates to non-physical substance in contrast with material things or the corporeal body. In this publication Jin follows his interest in language and graphic design as something that exists in both material forms and as part of a more ethereal or metaphysical spirit of life.

The structure of the book is turned inside out: beginning and end are placed next to each other in the middle of the book. This situation allowed to insert pages between the title page and the colophon that, however, remain outside of the narrative. It’s a paradoxical space that is created, physically part of the book but logically external to it.