Ailleurs 2: Meshwork Correspondence and the Middle Voice

Peer reviewed academic paper co-authored with Dr. Stephen Felmingham. This paper explored ideas of collaborative print practices found within the Ailleurs 2 Print Project and focused on ideas of the gift (Mauss,1954) and exchange. It explored ideas of meshwork and line (Ingold, 2016) in contemporary society and explored borders through the Takuhon print process. This research considered collaborative print practices, social engagement, mobility and the issue of European borders.

Ailleurs 2:

In the Ailleurs 2 exhibition proposal, printmakers from PCA and Spanish Partner Institutions will anonymously exchange utilitarian objects via post and digital means through which a visual response will be evoked through direct print processes, before and during their journey to Santander by sea and land. The local and cultural specificity of the exchanged objects will become further extrapolated through meeting in Santander, furthering their potential to become completed, altered or transformed through print.

This student and staff collaborative paper examines ideas of exchange and encounter (local, cultural, physical, hidden, felt) within Ailleurs 2, to extend Ingold’s concept of ‘meshwork’, as a physical encounter of objects, materials, surfaces and people in fluid, non-hierarchical ways, and to investigate ‘correspondence’ (2016) as affiliation within that dialogue, articulating printmaking’s potential to make manifest shared experiences.

Taking Ailleurs 2 as a live print project that will continue to evolve and transform during Impact 10, this paper will explore the implications of ‘The Gift’ (Mauss, 1954) where giving, receiving and the reciprocation of objects between people construct relationships, while further examining the act of printmaking as an additional channel for ‘interpenetration’ (Ingold, 2016) within that exchange.

The paper will extend Ingold’s metaphor of the ‘middle voice’ embedded in Ailleurs 2, where the objects/gifts offer the prospect of an intermingling of self and materiality through print and collaboration. This is further explored through the potlatch /potluck meal hosted by Ailleurs 2 where additionally, prints are exchanged within that encounter. The paper examines how print in this collaborative approach can make manifest a potential for profound understanding with others, to ‘common with them’ (Ingold, 2016) through gesture and materiality, encounter and exchange.