«I noticed that all these cool people were making things. My only entrance into this was if I made something too.» 09.08.2023 #2 2023

“(be)longing” is an ambitious one year experiment by American artist and publisher Jessica Williams residing at the bookstore, literature house and artist collective House of Foundation (H//O//F) in Moss. From November 2022 to December 2023, more than a dozen artists and writers will exhibit their work via five installation exhibitions, an open workshop and eight artist publications. A reading room with a rotating selection of books curated by Williams, independent bookshops, curators, artists and students is on display during and between exhibitions. Last month MA students from the Art and Public Space program at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO) held a pop-up show in the reading room where they activated the space with happenings, installations and workshops. The current exhibition, number three of five, featuring new work and artist publications by Jelsen Lee Innocent and Robin Mientjes is on display until 22 July.

What sets the “(be)longing” exhibitions apart from other art mediation projects is that it is an ever-evolving series of engagements. Each collaboration between Williams and the artists she curates leads to questions and conversations that evolve into future collaborations that evolve into more investigations ad infinitum. Williams acts as both conductor and conduit employing unconventional curatorial methods and DIY strategies of community building.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor (JLET): At the Bergen Art Book Fair, where you represented your micro-press, Hverdag Books, you spoke about how the role of a publisher sometimes gets blurred and you have to also act as an educator and advocate for the entire industry of artist books. Can you talk more about your multi-hyphenate role as a publisher?

Jessica Williams (JW): I’ve been working with artist publishing for a very long time. Probably the first time I ever self-published, as a lot of people do, was when I was a teenager. There was this generation of people that grew up on the Internet and I had a LiveJournal or Myspace [social media, ed. note] or something. I noticed that all these cool people were making things. My only entrance into this was if I made something too. In 2011, I actually started my first micropress, which is not the same one I have today. The first publishing project was called North, South, East, West (NSEW). Since we don’t have money or grants in the US, I wrote that I’m going to make twelve fanzines this year. Each of them was an edition that matched the days of the month. I said that if ten people want to support me and pay me 100 USD, I will send you one [fanzine] every month plus a postcard on your birthday. And ten people said “yes”. Ten people did it. People I know, people I did not know. That gave me the capital to start this publishing project.

JLET: Wow.

JW: It was crazy. It was beautiful.

JLET: What is it about materiality that interests you?

JW: I think that a lot of this fascination for something physical comes from our world being more and more digitized. Even though I’m talking about 2003 or something — that’s 20 years ago — you still longed for this physical connection. When I was a teenager, you’d send cassette tapes and letters and just having that physical thing was so special. I think that it allows you to engage in a very different way, as opposed to reading a blog. I like reading blogs. I like reading news on the Internet. Yet there’s something different reading in your hands. It gives you something unexpected and this very personal relationship that I appreciate, and I think a lot of people appreciate.

JLET: Two of your most recent authors, Dutch designer Robin Mientjes and Icelandic musician and illustrator Júlía Hermannsdóttir, write in their books on how instrumental you were in convincing, maybe even gently pushing them to write something when they had maybe never imagined publishing work. I was listening to a podcast with activist, philosopher, and author Angela Davis where she talked about the editorial process for her autobiography with her editor, the author Toni Morrison and how Toni pushed her to write at a time when she felt that she didn’t have anything to say. What is your editorial process like and what is that feeling or knowing of when an artist is ready to write?

JW: Júlía and Robin are both very different, and Júlía was maybe the first time that I was really acting as an editor because I really, truly edited that book. Over the years I’ve worked with so many artists. With NSEW it was insane; we published approximately 100 editions within four years. We worked with over 60 artists, published a lot of postcards, a lot of quick things, not as much editing. The project was primarily concerned with getting stuff out there. It was very fast paced, very intense. Hverdag [Books] has been very slow. For the first years, it was only my own works, just maybe one a year or every other year, but it really picked up with my participation in the opening exhibition at the National Museum. That was an amazing experience because I worked with four artists; two that I chose and two that the curator chose. None of them, well, except for one, had made an artist publication before. It was a really steep learning curve, but they all actively participated, and it was really exciting and fun working with so many different practices.

I also do a lot of teaching and workshops, and so I think over the years, I’ve just become more interested in helping others. At the same time, I found that what’s most important for me as a publisher is to publish things that are urgent, because I’ve seen so many artist publications — and I know the scene quite well and what’s there — and there’s still voices that are missing. I’ve come to a point in my career where I have a voice. I want to be able to share that with others.

JLET: In terms of risograph prints, I didn’t know about the process of using soybean or rice-based ink and it being a biodegradable process. How did you get into risograph printing, was it a technique you learned in art school? And what led you to creating Norway’s first (?) and only (?) Risograph Association (Norsk Risoforening)?

JW: It is the first association, but what’s even crazier is how I got into it. Okay, so I started NSEW in New York with a RISO printer we got on [the advertising forum, ed. note] Craigslist, and about six months in, I moved to Norway to start a Master at the Art Academy (KHiO). Literally, I go to the first meetings, and the study leader is like, ‘Two MA students are interested in publishing. We have a little bit of budget. Does anyone want to do anything?’ Everyone is just sitting there. So, I raised my hand. I’d heard rumors about RISO, but I’d never actually used it. I bought a RISO from eBay, from the US. Shipped it to my mom, and had it come over on a boat. It was wild. That is probably the first RISO in Norway that’s been used in an art context. I learned later, not long after it had arrived, that there was a RISO in the 90s, but it wasn’t very popular. The ink will smear if it’s too much coverage and you only get to print one color at a time. People didn’t understand it.

JLET: You have one at your home studio?

JW: I have one in my studio. I have the smallest one in Europe, so it “only” weighs 65 kilos, a miniature RISO.

JLET: Part of your work with Den kulturelle skolesekken (DKS) is teaching the students about biodegradable materials, right?

JW: Yeah, working with DKS has really been life-changing in a lot of ways. As an immigrant from outside the EU, there were demands placed on me that few of my peers had experienced or understood. I was subject to confusing and rigid visa requirements, simultaneously over and underqualified for every job, and my lack of Norwegian language skills and network left me totally outside of the realm of any possibilities for advancement in the art world or otherwise. I also had, though I did not have a name for it then, very acute climate anxiety. Part of the reason, obviously — that I was interested in RISO — was that it was more environmentally friendly.

I kind of just went through this period of like, you graduate with a Master’s, you’re overqualified for most jobs, underqualified for others. I couldn’t get a job, I couldn’t speak Norwegian, and I just literally was overwhelmed by climate questions. At that time, between 2014 and 2016, I was not making anything because I was so stressed about our collective impact on the environment. The project that I’m showing now with DKS is from 2016. It’s a work (title Oslofjord, ed. note) that I made that never got attention in Norway, but now everyone is looking at it. I won an award for it earlier this year in Halden, which was a wonderful surprise.

JLET: What’s the project?

JW: I have 100 liters of these strange Styrofoam ‘rocks’ that I picked in 2016. I think a lot of people have these tendencies to collect objects, especially if they’re beautiful or strange. I just could not stop finding them and picking them up on these islands in the inner Oslo fjord, the ones you can take the boats to. There was this moment where my partner was like: “What are you going to do with all this stuff? You haven’t made art in two years. You don’t have any exhibitions.”

I didn’t have my own RISO at the time, but there were more and more people getting them. So, I decided to make a book. That’s how Hverdag (Books) started. I found all these things, got a tiny bit of support and rented a friend’s RISO and printed the first publication.

I was basically touring around [with DKS] with a huge table full of these rocks, and then the kids had to find the ones that are real. It’s, like, strangely hard. We talk about what they are made of and what does it mean that nature is trying to take these things back, but it can’t? What does it mean to have climate anxiety? How can you make sustainable art? Can we do things in a different way? It was fantastic. I did performances for fifth graders, so they’re ten years old and they are a dream because they’re so curious and they just, like, want to know everything. They also are tender and can ask hard questions. They’re fascinated and scared because this stuff is weirdly attractive and scary. Microplastic. It’s in our bodies, it’s in all of the water in the world. It’s in the air. It’s like a can of worms. It’s scary.

JLET: Let’s talk about your current project. You’re embarking on a gigantic one-year exhibition, at House of Foundation. You’re curating five exhibitions, along with workshops, talks, an evolving reading room, over a dozen artists, and, of course, editing and printing artists’ books for each of the exhibiting artists. You’re also a mother to two children. First question is when do you sleep? And how is collaboration central to the be(longing) project?

JW: I have not gotten a lot of sleep the last six months, but I plan to get more because things are finally calming down. I’ve experienced, both in New York and in Norway, that all of the opportunities that have been given to me are by people who I suddenly have a connection with. When you are a woman and a person of color, it’s not so easy to have these connections because it’s very rare that there are people in positions of power that look like you or can see themselves in you. No one in Norway who has given me an opportunity looks like me, but they probably have more empathy or a very strong DIY-ethic. The people who have helped me are capable, but also see the power and the potential in collaboration and working with people that are different from themselves. And that happened with me and Martin [Sørhaug, House of Foundation]. I felt like it was immediate, it all just clicked. During that first conversation, he mentioned very casually that they were looking for someone to do the next extended exhibition. It seemed natural to bring in others. But I guess I’m also a little bit of a chaos demon. I wrote myself this mission statement so that I would be true to myself. In the “(be)longing” mission statement it says that the project is ever evolving and experimental. And if you’re really going to stick with that, I just kept myself open to anything that would happen: From two collaborators, it became twelve. It just kept growing. I love that the space is living, and there’s things happening, and a lot of people are seeing it. It’s really exciting.

JLET: Each of the exhibiting artists has a connection to Scandinavia, but also a connection to outside of Scandinavia, as you do being an American. Where does this idea of belonging come from?

JW: There was this serendipitous thing that happened last year. I’ve been working with this curator based in New York, going on at least seven years, on and off. Kathy Cho curated me into a show in 2015 in Philadelphia, and then contacted me out of the blue in 2022 to ask if she could include my work in an exhibition proposal of works by Asian diaspora artists exploring queer ecologies. Of course, I said “yes”, because I love her vision and we got that show in Chicago. In relation to that, she wrote a text about my practice because she’s known it for so long, using the stylized word (be)longing. And I was like, wow. The title came directly from someone else looking at my work and presenting it back to me.

JLET: The exhibitions thus far are connected on the theme of perspective, wouldn’t you say? It makes me think about John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972) in which he writes: “We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.” In your bio you write that your practice “hinges on the act of seeing.” What do you mean by that?

JW: When I present to 14-year-olds, I always ask them this question: “Why should we care about things we do not see?” Because I think there’s actually a lot of things we can see. If we just look closer or go in from a different angle. I would ask them again: “So, what are things that we can’t see?” Capital, power, racism, pollution. There’re so many things that are so easy to ignore or just not really pay attention to. In all of my works, there’s an attempt to see the invisible. You’re never going to be able to do that in real life. Or you can touch these strange things that look natural, but they’re not. Then you have that experience. All the people I’m working with this year — in their own way, on their terms — give you, the viewer, a glimpse into what they see on daily basis. As a curator and as a collaborator, I try as hard as I can never to say: “No, you can’t do that.” When I work as an editor, my interest really lies in bringing out more humanity or empathy, bringing out more vulnerability. I’m never going to tell someone they can’t use a certain type of imagery or have to make a certain type of work. I’m more interested in what people themselves want to make.

JLET: There is a running theme of this dichotomy between the gigantic and the invisible. Your work Reimagining the data center as mycelium which examines how Big Tech affects biodiversity goes deeper into this.

JW: — Yeah! This work was really seminal for me in a lot of ways. I think doing this both on a practical and on an artistic level prepared me for “(be)longing”. There comes a point when you also have angst about making things. I wasn’t really producing big artworks for many years. I think my son was maybe three months old when I applied for an open call. I just realized that if I was going to show in Norway, I had to apply for things, that’s number one. I also had to not be scared about the scale of what I desired to make. This exhibition centered around the fact that Google had recently bought 200 hectares of forest outside Skien and that they were going to build a so-called hyperscale data center. My first question was: How big is that? I wanted to make a work where you kept walking and walking and walking in this kind of dark, invisible, underground space, and you would never reach the end because it would take you something like five hours to walk across how big that space actually is. Since that was not possible and not exactly how VR works, I obviously changed the idea.

I am a very avid mushroom picker, and before doing this work, I’d never brought mushrooms into my work. Often mycelium [network system of fungal roots or threads or hyphae, ed. note] gets referred to as the Internet of the forest. Although this is not exactly true, mycelium is everywhere — it’s in the air. Without it we would not have chocolate, we would not have bread. But we can’t see it. Without it, there are so many things in our life that would be different. That, for me, is the same as the Internet, because the interface of the Internet is so seamless and integrated into our routines that we almost don’t see it or its impact. Let’s talk about climate anxiety. People think, “okay, I can take a million photos as long as I don’t print it out, there’s no impact.” But the cloud is not invisible. The cloud is these really resource hungry data centers that are interpreting, processing, and storing our information. It’s very physical. For me, trying to understand this space and creating an almost physical room that was a bit distorted but clearly recognizable — that you could experience — was really interesting to me. In that work, you go inside a space modeled on a data center, but it’s a lot darker and eerier. I commissioned some music from this really wonderful artist, Pernille Meidell. And then you hear different sounds: data center sounds. You hear the actual Google-forest. You hear excerpts from interviews that I’ve done with different people, from locals who are interested in the environment, to someone who’s an expert on renewable energy, to a woman who’s written a book about the actual infrastructure of the Internet. You just walk around and hear these voices talk to you, and every time you go in, it’s a bit different.

The programmers I worked with were amazing. They even built in a secret room, so if you go the opposite way, you end up in a different place. It’s only 50 square meters, but the space changes depending on how you interact with it and what you touch and what you go in. For me, this is always the most interesting: These open-ended experiences, they’re not necessarily the same. Maybe this is also the chaos demon thing, where I want my works to hit people on different levels. Like, if you stay there longer, maybe you’ll get the whole thing, but if you don’t, you’ll still get an interesting experience. I think the same about publications, that you can interact with them on different levels.