“and Archive” is a printing press, a workshop for ideas, a playtest, a record for artistic processes, a library, and a curatorial device staged on fugitive, shape-shifting surfaces. Building from a range of printed matter – text, images, and formats – produced over the decade and templates proposed for the future, aA hopes to produce an ecology of ideas and knowledge forms originating from the artist-book-object. In its mandate, it learns from the printed histories of Asia and departs on speculative journeys across linear, suspended, and simultaneous time, producing new regions, case studies, and visions for our present.

As a framework aA is malleable and mutating – it allows participants and contributors to restructure and reorganize, translate – to bring new contexts, a diversity of voices, positions, and actions. This framework trains from the resilience of nature and the human pursuit to uphold freedoms – to protest, keep vigil, sing and hold ground. It strives to situate content in the context it emerges from – geographically, and politically. In doing so, it sometimes abandons the printed object for transmissions, both verbal and virtual; and the surface of a book as a mode of resistance, solidarity, and acts of coming together. To exit the book sometimes is to arrive at the sensorial possibility of story-telling, and singing.

The ‘and’ in aA is a nod to the power of interdependence, sharing, thinking together and co-development. It places its faith in thought forms that emerge from conversations, dialogue, and states of togetherness.