Collective interfaces & folklore
by Doriane on the 26 May 2025
Blogging is about expressing yourselves, but also about slowly creating sensible and situated archives. I realize I care about Meyboom, but realizing exactly what is it that make me care about Meyboom is more difficult. I think we could try to blog about the daily studio lifes, role-playing the reporters of our own practices and habbits.
A website is both a structure and an invitation to interact. For me, one of the power of writing on websites is that we can make a lot of different levels of informations coexist! Some very official and important sounding, and other that looks like silly gossips, some carefully crafted, and others that are triggered by sudden feeling of urgencies, some formulated like practicalities, and others with very specific tones or attitude.
In a blog, (or more generally when writing on personnal or communal websites), there isn't especially a need for consistancy. Each element can sparks from subjective intentions, it's together as an accumulation of usages that they start to describe (collective) narratives. It also doesn't need be writen at once as coesive document (like a prescriptive usage), but more importantly practiced over long period of time accepting the frictions, the subjectivities and the constant changes (descriptive usage). Hopefully, this will sparks others interest to participate!
A typical example such collective and accumulative interfaces are display boards. They creates weird uncomplete collages of moments, patchworks of more or less randomly selected individual or collective intentions. Another example could be how the collection of objects in a shared kitchen talks about who eat there. Well, blogging about daily life at Meyboom can be seen as very similar to using the same kitchen, or the same display board, unless it's about writing on the same website. Maybe we'll need some rules at some points, but it's mostly through practicing that more specific pattern appears.
Meyboom is a specific type of community, because what first links us all together is the sharing of a space in which we practice as artists. I would say it's similar to being roommate but for artistic practice. Artist-run-space-mate is a clearly too long, and workmate sound too boring.
In this group of roughly 35 artists we usually don't all know each others at first, and we are there because, well, we need a studio to work. As part of what links us comes from a very practical need, what really connect us can be really fragile. Are we coworkers? not really, we don't especially collaborate on work. At the same time we do work together to run the space (even if in limited amount). Are we friends? sure, some of us are, but it's not mandatory (and shouldn't be). Are we sharing about our practice? Are their bridges between what we do as artists? On an official level this isn't formulated, but one of my point of interest is how connections innevitably leaks through our daily lifes being close to each other in the space. With time and repeated gestures as the main ingredient, slowly, certain things solidify themselves as bridges between us.
Lunch gossips, shared knowledge on co-running the space, seeing each others at events outside of Meyboom, exchanging about collaborators in commons such as institutions, schools, or other collectives. This also make such space not only space where we work, but spaces where information travels. But receiving requiere a particular attention maybe, because it is never through official announcment, it's more like folklore. Folk is people, and lore is knowledge; folklore to me is the knowledge that lives firstly in between the people. That is to say the knowledge that is not in the academic books, not in the official documents, not in the manifest, not in the institutions, but in people talks and actions. I believe folkloric network are very powerfull, probably because they are very difficult things to formalize.
So who else is interested to blog as an naive attempt to share and amplify Meyboom folklore & gossips?
