About the Collaboration

Collaboration is a book about collaborative practice, created through collaborative practice. The project started as a conversation between Assemble and artist-designers, Stinsensqueeze — feeling for the limits of what a collective monograph could look like, how it could be made, and how it would behave in the world. Common-editions joined as a third collaborator, and over a two year period the three co-publishers experimented with different editorial forms, structures, and strategies to arrive at a book that represented collective working in both form and content. 

The text in the book does not prioritise one voice or perspective over another. Authored in a series of conversations, which were then edited collectively, the body text holds diverse perspectives within a single authorial voice. This experimental text strategy is periodically interrupted by contributions from some of Assemble’s many collaborators, who have put forth diverse material to represent their experiences of working with Assemble. 

The book was designed through a dialogue-driven process, which took the form of experimental workshops to arrive at the major design elements used in the design — grid, line, colour and font. The workshops were playful and open-ended, encouraging collaboration by swapping work at set intervals so that the final elements were produced by many hands. These design outcomes are idiosyncratic, playing with the conventions of each graphic design component. The grid, line, palette, and font that emerged from these sessions formed the tool kit for Collaboration's design, and the basis of Bits & Pieces — a game produced by the three co-publishers as a fundraising edition for the book, envisioned as a way to facilitate further modes of creative play using these outcomes of the design workshops. 

The result is a book about working collectively that came out of a process of radical collaboration. Every element of the editorial structure, text, and design was created collectively through conversation and experimentation. Collaboration is a celebration — of the process, practice, and radical promise — of working together.