An Opening Manifesto
Collage image source: ‘Cover of the Manifesto of the Socialist League, 1885.’
Digital image from the Tim Davenport collection, no copyright claimed.
Author: William Morris, Ernest Belfort Bax
Digital image from the Tim Davenport collection, no copyright claimed.
Author: William Morris, Ernest Belfort Bax
PAMphlet, PAM for short, is a platform whose caretakers are Alison Scott and Rosie Roberts, who are friends and an artist-writing duo, working under the moniker again+again.
PAM will be a place for creative-critical writing: writing that is art, writing through art and writing about art. In all these ‘arts’ global context dwells, so PAM aims to hold that space.
PAM is ideally as open as it can be, in its workings, to criticism, to development and change.
PAM is intersectional, anti-racist, anti-ableist, abolitionist, feminist, and works towards Palestinian, Trans and Mad liberation and more.
PAM might be opinionated, messy, poetic, and signal its authors and editors’ own aesthetic sensibilities.
PAM will hopefully be able to host more than writing and may become live or publish paper texts one day.
PAM is a DIY endeavour. We are not ready and don’t have time yet for anything else. We’re spending the energy we would have used on a funding application on just doing-the-thing, getting it started. It is two people with intersecting health, care and wage labours, spending some hours a week because there used to be some space like this and now it feels like much of that space is gone.
PAM is not the first of its kind and that’s a good thing! PAM is built on our experience in DIY arts publishing, living on the outskirts and inskirts of academia, writing and editing texts for arts organisations. Critically, PAM is reflective of our time at MAP Magazine: PAM would not be happening if MAP was still happening and we owe so much to Laura Haynes and Alice Bain and all the artists and writers that wrote for MAP in the time we edited there, before and beyond.
PAM is here because we’ve been thinking about these gaps we feel, together and apart. PAM might not look like this forever, we are just getting started!
A bit about us: In our collaborative practice, we are interested in the material and social relations between art writing, audio-visual work, and facilitation. Working together, we form a discursive partnership to provoke and enable each other.
Our editorial and facilitation work aims to allow those we engage with to think expansively and experimentally about the shape of their work: to think about what writing – the act and the outcome – could mean for their practice without inflicting binaries between art, writing and criticism.
From there we’re open. We can offer our editorial labour, this platform and potential.
Perhaps you have a text that’s been looking for a home, something you were invited to write or that is unsolicited. Something lingering in a hard drive, crunched up in a print out, or performance script. A bug-bear, a niggle, something that needs hashing out, that could use someone else’s input or attention. We want to give space to that.
That’s PAMphlet.
‘The manifesto’ is a declarative form of writing with radical roots, that seeks to change the status quo, and sees writing as a tool of power. We have been long inspired by manifestos written by feminists, socialists, and those seeking liberation across struggles, from Women in the Year 2000 (Carolee Schneemann, USA, 1977), A Cyborg Manifesto (Donna Haraway, USA, 1985), to Feministo (Sisters Uncut, UK, 2018).
Many of these manifestos were gathered in 2024 by Cooper Gallery, DJCAD, for their event ‘A Manifesto Class’ (part of the exhibition ‘The Ignorant Art School: Outside the Circle’) where participants from across Scotland’s art schools sounded out excerpts from Feminist and Queer Manifestos written by artists, designers, writers, collectives and activists between 1791 and 2024. Get in touch with Cooper Gallery at coopergallery@dundee.ac.uk if you’d like to read this collection.