Summer 2026
What’s an essay between friends?
Alison & Rosie practise becoming caretakers of PAM, friends documenting art, political conditions, & literature ~~ in, as & through ~~ expanded writing

Listen to Rosie reading the text

Download as simple pdf

Collage including ‘Woodcut illustration of a man writing’, Gerard Leeu (Publisher), 1486, Antwerp, Belgium. CRC Inc.F.94.

“I’m picking up where we never left off” says Stefano Harney of his public conversations with Fred Moten, noting that each happening, each invitation to talk, is an ongoing moment in their ongoing rehearsal, their personal-made-public prefiguration practice and friendship.¹ A friendship that creates space for thinking and experimenting with others. This iterative, discursive space is where we open this essay between friends, where we take to heart Harney and Moten’s assertion that “practice is where you can be with everyone, where you can be with your friends”.

Published texts are a document, a performance and the object of practice/s, they are “the play of exploration and confusion of boundaries between self and other, work and leisure" their reading creates reflective space and ideally discussion, feeling, action.² Text can be a gathering. For us, practice as a place to be with is essential. And so we decided to create a place to gather, PAMphlet. Our friendship and parallel art and writing practices were the nexus for this creative collaboration, alongside a shared disposition of practicality, some conspiratorial eye rolling, eating, reading and a belief in the potential of sharing. PAM is motivated by this idea of an ongoing invitation to be with ourselves and others through textual matter.

So, what’s a project between pals? And why does it need an essay? We want to take some time here to situate one with the other: PAM with us; the project with the conversations we’re having about it. Thinking about what it means to ‘take the matter into common hands’.³ In the opening chapter of their book Friends In Common, Joel White and Laura C. Foster talk about the roots of a shared project being laid in conversation and connection:

“We want to treat friendship as foundational to revolutionary projects, not peripheral…”⁴

Their book was foundational to the impetus of writing this essay, to lay out the doing of works’ relationship with our friendship, and thus our project. Art writing's relationship to revolution can seem tenuous—but we would like to see if that tenacity can be stretched and deployed. How else can the theory we read, write and think through come into life? How does creative or responsive text act to pull things apart, to help imagine otherwise, can we get that to exist on this website?

“Art as militant research is the undoing, the unmaking and the unfolding of singular issues and subjects into knots, relationships, greater configurations and cosmologies of relations.”⁵

We are intent on doing the stretching together with a dual mind, seeking a release from individualised thinking in our rhythmic back and forth of question and critique. From doing that work of writing, performing, making and editing together, our work has a leit-motif of saying what we are doing, as we do it: presenting the conditions, context, not skipping the icky, awkward stuff. We are interested in infrastructure, informed by DIY sensibility, the ‘doing from below’ of commoning while being somewhere in the middle. All this means we often work with others or responsively in whatever form best suits the occasion, helping each other to adjust and reposition ourselves through cooperative facilitation. Our work has emerged from the shared space of doing and hanging out and hanging out in the edits.

“But then there’s this other question of rhythm that has to do with the fact that our writing is a form of correspondence.”⁶

During the last eight years we have developed a working atmosphere, this rhythm of correspondence, which we want to extend—the atmosphere of our collaboration where we can always pick up where we never left off. Mostly what we do together involves linkages—connecting ideas and people, writers and readers, artists and viewers. So we want to talk about what we do together—friendship, work—as an open loop, attempting to avoid the nepotistic lurkings where access is gained only personally and thus feeds access to this platform. That is hard though as often the reason we might make a friend is because we love their thoughts, and therefore perhaps their work. So we will try to take what’s valuable from friendship’s feelings and workings and extend them outwards. Alison’s thinking of some kind of clip system or open chain network, Rosie’s thinking about putting the workings on the outside so the inside is visible, accessible so you can see the guts, it will be very clear that you can get in touch with us to work on writing to present through the platform. This is the: ‘practice is where you can be with everyone’ part. An atmosphere that welcomes unknowns, adjuncts, tangents, distraction and focus and action and analyses.

This atmosphere fluctuates in its component parts, and was perhaps most public in the past through our shared experience working together at MAP Magazine. Since then there’s been workshops, screenings, a sporadic crit club, writing groups, exchanges of edits, the exhibition on a balcony, performances and many trains and many sandwiches. It has also been happening behind the scenes, shaping or tidying work which makes its way to a public without displaying that work. When Alison moved back up east and started a PhD some new elements were added, as when Rosie became a parent more too: a little more wisdom a little more frustration; more costs to living; less places to create; a little less of a fuck to give; a little more appreciation of the space that our atmosphere could provide. We take all of this into PAM, thinking about the platform as a fresh breath, a way to say we’re keeping going, we’re in and we are determined to try.

Amid the clamour of online publishing that can flip flop between what’s hot and what’s not—we want to commit to the ideas, the practice, the politics that endure, create action and champion creative critical thinking, in the face of slop, listicles, far right propaganda machines and the dilution of powerful thought into digestible bites etc. Frustrated discussions with curators and artists about the norms and whims of (more traditional) arts publishers have common notes: the superficially light reworkings of press releases, too much in-housing and clique touting, the casual quips of ‘not getting it’ or ‘not having time’, the reviews lost amid ads and glossy head shots and the posturing of funders and collectors, and five star hotels for the play boys of this world that we will never meet. In thinking of these artifices we’re also thinking of those who tried to crack them from within—of Artforum firing their editor David Velasco for his solidarity with Palestinians. Elsewhere, of social media slides highlighting wine, Aperol and detailed discussions with curators who still consent to sharing a platform at La Biennale with genocidal Israel and Russia. Trying to find out what integrity looks like (in the arts? at all?), we have a bee in our bunnet about journalism —because fuck them and their complicity in genocide and the cover up of climate crisis.

“We have to do it this way—improvisationally—.”⁷

The improvisation, of acting like people-who-run-a-thing, is part of the How To of doing. We’re mad, sick, carers, with day jobs, too busy and not getting paid for this atm. We are improvising the parameters, testing them, experimenting with no funds and no boundaries—except the capacities of a cheap website and squeezed time—at first. This means there are some janky things and it might change shape as we go.

When improvising motivations are important.

We miss the writing we once saw in abundance—there’s an argument to be made here that the milieu we came from is a dog that’s had its day—art writing courses that nurtured us and our peers have closed or are closing, the magazine we first worked together at is gone, the building that held it and so much more sold off, the larger structures fallen to the enemy. But we refuse to be put down. We want that abundance back, to sit along with the likes of GAM, SPAM, Mount Jupiter, Rosie's Disobedient Press (not this Rosie, one smaller and hairier) and Making Publics Press, Bumper, Gutter, Variant et al. We want it to be accessible from near and far, hence online. We have learnt a lot from Cooper Gallery’s Group Critical Writing (at risk due to unfolding cuts at University of Dundee), miss the likes of the 2HB, White Review and are excited about the return of Suite 212. We know this is big hopes big wishes, but why not give ourselves a mountain to fall from, we’ll learn a lot bouncing down through bushes and bogs.

This leads us to a repeated thought we share—activity exists and persists then goes missing—poems held in the gallery space, an amazing reading whose writer hasn’t yet managed to get the piece published, a protest speech recorded on a phone, a conversation which could be shared, reflections on an experimental exhibition in someone's garden never committed to the page—the art and the thoughts forgotten by many held onto by few. This is especially true of activity in places with less visibility— outside of large cities, or on islands, or in the very North. We would also like to play Cupid for those who want to commission or co-commission writing but have no place to put it, or for people making artworks, poetry books, performances who would like other people to read it or write about it!

We care about the archival aspect of documenting through and with writing—we love to look back at old issues of Variant and find a note about a piece of artist moving image and then become a detective to find it again, along the way we meet new friends. We are scared of our abilities to be archivists in this sense, but we will not let fear stop us. We are trying to figure out how to do this the way we would like it to be done. Live! Ha!

“...[T]rying to figure out – with friends, in acts of friendship – the links between political struggle and interpersonal belonging, and what historical resonances might help us to do so. [...] – a commitment to forming intimacies despite the individualising and apathy-inducing capitalist machine – and as a key sustaining force within political struggles of various kinds.”⁸

We are committed to giving new writers an opportunity, being as open as possible to people and their ideas. While we wish we could pay each other and all of you, there’s a turn back to voluntary labour for a sense of freedom that feels connected to the increasing influence of the right on the arts. Having no money = no funders = we set the tone = ACAB, no TERFS, Free Palestine, the full tilt. And we would love to see art writing that explicitly holds this, as well as all the weird and beautiful and diligently researched works that are written without making it explicit but with it all in mind.

There are also more dare we say aesthetic, material, intertextual motivations for our desire to create a publishing platform. Rosie is preoccupied with the Behind The Scenes of cultural production—the novel drafts, the film treatments, the performance scores alongside the freaky and funny and awkward writing production that slinks around, she wants to take it all to the front of the house. Alison is a sucker for found text, fragmentation and heavy quoting—reimagining and exceeding archives, shot lists, catalogues, policies—the reenchantment of operational, institutional and instructional language. As our own practices are collaborative led, process based, research informed relational experiments these provisional documents are the essential ephemera of our medium. And also because this is the stuff as younger artists/writers/whatevers we remember as mysteries… how does it all happen? Then you are thirty six and understand that ‘short’ novel took eight years to produce.

There’s a little Scottish flavour to it all too—this is where we are and where we want to show off, we love that people come here from everywhere for all sorts of reasons, and we want to showcase the incredible work that is going on. Reach out, say hi, we don’t know who we don’t know! From John O’Groats to G42 baby!

References

1. Refusing Completion: A Conversation Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, and Stevphen Shukaitis, e-flux Journal, 2021https://www.e-flux.com/journal/116/379446/refusing-completion-a-conversation

2. Art/Commons: Anthropology beyond capitalism, Massimiliano Mollona, Zed Books, 2021

3. Taking The Matter Into Common Hands: On Contemporary Art and Collaborative Practices, Ed. Johanna Billing, Maria Lind and Lars Nilsson, Black Dog Publishing, 2007

4. Friends in Common: Radical Friendship and Everyday Solidarities, Laura C. Forster and Joel White, Pluto Press, 2025

5. Art/Commons: Anthropology beyond capitalism, Massimiliano Mollona, Zed Books, 2021

6. Refusing Completion: A Conversation Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, and Stevphen Shukaitis, e-flux Journal, 2021https://www.e-flux.com/journal/116/379446/refusing-completion-a-conversation

7. IBID

8. Friends in Common: Radical Friendship and Everyday Solidarities, Laura C. Forster and Joel White, Pluto Press, 2025

HOME