Place Holder

Place Holder is the aftermath of a peripatetic residency, the attempt of a small group to hold still what would otherwise slip away: the conversations that fill in the space between us during moments of rest, after dinner, on the couch, over some wine.

Between artist book and collective essay, Place Holder is a working process between eleven artists and researchers conducted through a series of thematic conversations reflecting on their participation in the Caravan residency, which brought the group variously to Alexandria (Egypt), Athens (Greece), Biella (Italy), Brussels (Belgium), Marseille (France), and Nicosia (Cyprus) over the course of four months at the beginning of 2022.

Transcripts
The texts presented in Place Holder are in an unresolved form, neither a raw transcription nor an edited script. While they have been edited for clarity and to reduce repetition, certain errors of the machine transcription and the quirks of spoken language have been left in place to best reflect the literary quality of speech.

We hope that any difficulty in reading might reflect the complexity of listening in conversation.

Images
Images were gathered by the participants in Place Holder during the Caravan residency period across the programme’s many geographies. Unlabeled and ambiguated into a magenta and black palette, they indicate the associative framework through which Place Holder proceeded as a collective response.

Contributors
Chiara Cartuccia, Onur Çimen, Lodovica Guarnieri, Stella Ioannidou, Sara Fakhry Ismail, Zeynep Kaserci, Gabriele Leo, Mark Lotfy, Omnia Sabry, Mahmoud El Safadi, Islam Shabana and Virgil b/g Taylor.

The printed edition was edited by Chiara Cartuccia and Lodovica Guarnieri. It was designed by Fag Tips.