Missing Out
– experiments in collective writing and editing

• 13.5 x 19 cm
  Risograph printed in medium blue, burgundy, hunter green and black
  Cover folding out to 28x38cm poster with essay inside, bound with blue elastic
  Three booklets: 13.5cm x 19cm (double folded pages, stapled and bound with bookbinding tape), 12 cm x 17cm (sewn), 10.5cmx14.8cm (sewn)
  Edition of 100
  ISBN: 978-1-3999-8663-2
  
  

Text and images collectively written, created and edited by
Jelena Aleksic, Ana Čavić, Mia Ćuk, Renata Gaspar, Alyssa Grossman, Vaiva Jucevičiūtė-Bartkevičienė, Kaamos Metsikkö, Janaína Moraes, Nay Saysourinho, Carol Stampone and Sef, with contributions from Maryam Bagheri and Erica Böhr
Introduction by Mia Ćuk, Renata Gaspar and Sef
Publication edited and designed by Mia Ćuk, Renata Gaspar and Sef
This publication was made financially possible by Nordic Summer University Artistic Research | Performing Heterotopia study circle (2019 -2021) 
Cover image Katrin Keller

Printed in the UK at Earthbound Press Cambridge (booklets) and Pagemasters (cover)

Copyright © the authors and contributors, 2025

What did not happen because something else happened?
What stayed on the edges of experience?
What is unnamed, misnamed, misseen and misexperienced?
Words not written while writing something else
Sentences not spoken while speaking of other things
Directions not followed while on the way elsewhere

 

Our point of departure was an idea of missing out as a form of participation. The process welcomed participants to enter without a pre- formed intention of what we would achieve, and to explore receiving and responding. We met regularly in the course of over one year, on Zoom, to try to create a process based on openness – to surprise, uncertainty, the unexpected, not knowing, being affected by others. We hoped to experiment and learn through collaborative writing (writing in a very expanded sense); not a collection of separate independent contributions but a collective creation developed through a collaborative process. In this publication-object there are no identifiable authorial voices or names attached to any particular piece of writing. This was a process of unlearning; letting go of initial thoughts, of fixed ideas of content and form, of preconceived views of what to do and how to do it. We all brought our own knowledge and experience into the spaces of discussion, written and verbal, but we tried to use them as starting points to go somewhere not yet known and to respond not only to ourselves but to others. The process was an exercise of commitment to the collaborative aspects of the work; to the attunement of oneself to the needs of the group; to the relationality between the different spaces and modes of discussion; to making common space a mode of being; to an active process of construction, with others.