Essay: Polyphonic Thinking / Thinking Polyphony: An inquiry into collective curating for YEAR

For YEAR I wrote an article called 'Polyphonic Thinking / Thinking Polyphony: An inquiry into collective curating'.

YEAR is an annual magazine published by Komplot and David Evrard in collaboration with the designers Pierre Huyghebaert and Uberknackig. YEAR is thought of as a non-linear narrative inspired from the "cause and effect" paradigm or more: "TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCE."

Its subjective approach, closely ingrained with the artists, curators and the experiences they raise, slips in commentaries or reports about different elements - exhibitions, interventions, conferences, books, objects - that appear influential. 

According to the principle of chain reaction YEAR addresses the journalistic model, organizing its content in the form of sequences. And YEAR is a scene, an experimental constellation, a scene as obsessive accumulation opposed to archives, distinction opposed to evaluation, narrative to order, cool to distance, taste to energy, beauty to sense, sense to idea, idea to experience, experience to life and life to style and style to knowledge and knowledge to power and power to shit.

Metropolis M wrote about YEAR

Here's an excerpt from my article 'Polyphonic Thinking / Thinking Polyphony: An inquiry into collective curating'

One wonders whether language can include a variety of voices and how collective work processes may be communicated. In Katharina Schlieben’s research on collective curating I saw my own questions, stemming from the practice of working in an Amsterdam based collective, repeated: questions concerning consensus and the possibility of a ‘shared’ language. These questions could be summarized as: If there is something like polyphony, than what does it consist of?

Question:

Would you consider the practice of Komplot to be polyphonic?

In between polyphony and symphony.

The polyphony is musical composition that uses simultaneous, largely independent, melodic parts, lines, or voices. It’s also the representation of different sounds by the same letter in a writing system. Composition. Independent. Voices and lines (as a narrative) are the words I have to recognize in that definition. It’s a system of writing, no more, no less.

If we decide to use a demo from a cheap sampler, that’s just something else.

It depends of what you wanna write, what story you have to tell…

- David Evrard, artist in Residency at KOMPLOT