Instruction Manuals for Gathering

Instruction Manuals for Gathering is a series of instabooks in relation to participating in collective gatherings, with an emphasis on sharing the typically hidden labour of creating, organizing, and holding gathering spaces.

Instruction Manuals for Gathering is embedded in the academic research landscape. The members of Axiology Clinic would like to acknowledge and thank the University of Alberta's President's Grant for the Creative and Performing Arts for its generous support of the project "Groundmaking as praxis: Cultivating supportive conditions for research-creative graduate student work in KSR & FRM lab spaces".

Christine J. Ha's hands lifting a piece of paper off a mylar lined steel press-bed.

(CJH lifting a print, 2023)

Covers of two zines sit side-by-side on a green tablecloth. Title of works: a basket of worries vols. 1 & 2. On the left, the title is typewritten and collaged onto loosely woven coloured strips of paper that are blue, green, grey, pink, and purple. On the right, the title is typewritten in black all-caps against a background of red typewritten words that repeat the phrase "I worry." Below the title, two-thirds of the way down the cover is a dual-lined oval filled with a collage of red and black typewritten words that say 'worry' and 'worries'.

(Collaged zines: a basket of worries vols. 1 & 2, 2024)

Project Overview

This collaborative project is a way in which we are considering questions of how to be in intentional community.  The sparks for this project were brought forth by questions of how to visibilize, and share, the labour of holding gathering spaces.

In Instruction Manuals for Gathering, we are using zine-style, instabooks as a way to pragmatically organize, and document while exploring questions of how we might be in collaborative, interdependent spaces while bringing into conversation the complexities of doing so with our axiological commitment to belonging.