Publication | Riso-print / A5 / Edition: 200 | 2020 | Published by PrintRoom (NL)

Featuring contributions by: Yindi Chen, Hannah Dawn Henderson, Elena Kostenko, Kees van Leeuwen, Alexandre Richardeau, Grigoris Rizakis, Karolina Rupp, Tomasz Skibick, and Yindi Chen. 

Our first project, 15 03 20, emerged as not so much a response but rather a meditation on the precarity of the Covid-19 pandemic – an attempt to document the conditions of that period without simply resorting to photojournalism. Rather, the chapbook-style booklet enfolds an intimate, almost pocket-sized exposition space, wherein a series of double-page spreads provide a snapshot of each artist’s practice at that time. These vignettes, which can be understood as both documentation of a moment in time as well as artworks in and of themselves, are cushioned between essays by Yindi Chen and Alexandre Richardeau that explore the notion of ‘the haptic encounter’. These essays are situated as a conceptual and point-of-entry, reiterating the book’s ‘spatiality’ – a space to be traversed, suggestive of yet not demanding of a linear route.

The title of 15 03 20 is a nod to the circumstances surrounding an earlier, unrealised project proposal. The autumn of 2019 saw the beginnings of an exhibition plan, to be titled Notes on Hapticity (from which our collective’s name derives) – this was originally set to be our first collective project, with the opening scheduled for May 2020. Yet, for all the contingencies we had anticipated, we had not considered the prospect of contending with a global pandemic. Our last in-person meeting was punctuated by a government announcement: that all café, restaurants and bars were to close, along with many leisure and cultural organisations, at 18:00 that evening. It was already 18:12 and we were sitting in one such restaurant in The Hague. We parted ways and became fragmented — geographically, at least, and perhaps also in the sense of the occasional stutter and glitch of our respective webcams, seemingly struggling with the overburdened broadened connections. That last meeting took place on the 15th March 2020.