For Six Voices, Perhaps

In January 2020, Annas asked: How might collaboration span across distance and how is writing a tool to understand these possibilities? 

A year later and in the hands of Annas’ second residency cohort, the open-ended question quickly unfolds: 

How do you turn yourself into writing? How does writing bring us closer together, how does unmaking bring us closer together? What of repetition, of sound — of choir. Nothing is neat, the whole has never been cohesive. If an end is an opening, what might we step into next? 

For Six Voices (Perhaps) is a culmination of these questions. Over the course of eight months and many states, Daniele Vickers, Gabriel Chalfin-Piney, Logan Kruidenier, Willy Smart, Zach Nicol, with design work by Ally Fouts, used writing as a vehicle to move closer to, alongside and in between  each other during a year of extreme separation: “[Collaboration is] not about being in the same place at the same time but it is about a kind of presence shared in and as displacement.” (Fred Moten in “An Interview with Fred Moten, 2015) As they learned about one another, the group could witness and influence the collective spirit as it emerged on the page despite / in light of the cohort’s physical displacement.

As they experimented with written disruptions and interventions into each other’s writing, individual voices became stronger, succinct and discernible. At the same time, a collective echo sounded through the works. A type of writing that moved, touched, and connected in a way physical bodies could not. A writing not for the published page, but one that echos, literally, through the room, “a writing that might very well disappear, be deleted where deletion just means a different kind of dispersion or disbursal, just getting in the air in a different kinda way, a memory of talking and studying together, that gets told or retold or untold, as the case may be.” (Moten, 2015)

Thank you to ACRE for your time, resources and space for the residents to come together and collaborate, Ally Fouts for design and production, Lumpen Radio for hosting the residents’ broadcast, and Albany Press for printing. To support these organizations, you can support Annas here, ACRE here, and Lumpen Radio here.