MOULD Cultures of Assembly

Working in collaboration with Mould for us at Studio Miessen has been an intense pleasure, but also a challenge. Not because we did not enjoy the process of working with one another, but rather because of the potential difficulties of dealing with a luxurious problem: to be granted carte blanche can be a very intimidating experience. The way in which we dealt with this was to throw ourselves into one of the research subjects that we have been working on for some time now, Cultures of Assembly. Mould offered us to develop some- thing that in the context of any other publication would be highly difficult. Being granted total freedom as for the conception of our own issue – which would also happen to be the very first issue of Mould to go into print – we attempted to use the open and flexible structure that was made available to us in order to explore it as a space for dialogue and investigation, commissioning writing and observations that would bastardize our own understanding and per- ception of the subject. We explored a post-disciplinary approach to the subject that contains both contaminations as well as heteroge- neous bastardizations of the term. In order to investigate, interpret and speculate on the complexity of contemporary culture in the con- text of Cultures of Assembly, we imagined the vessel of this publica- tion as an archive-in-the-making of our current thinking in terms of the subject. Mould’s conceptual framework of print and tracing formed the start- ing point of this investigation. To curate a publication based on the premise of no structural or historic demands or prerequisites for us turned into a playful analysis of our own thinking and, hence, our own form(s) of (studio) production. In this sense, this issue should not be read as a closed book, but rather as a vessel in motion, an ad hoc production of frozen thought