The terms ‘collective’ and ‘community’ frequently invoked to convey the opposite – terms such as competition, big business, capitalist etc. But are they being expected to do too much? They suggest care, solidarity, collaboration and survival but they can also conceal the labour, responsibility, exhaustion, and uneven availability that underpin the collective life. Being an Art Collective, Then? is a zine that begins from that tension.
Collective and community are not treated here as stable forms. They appear as names that emerge under pressure, when relations become necessary and visible or strained and difficult to sustain. This zine asks how collective practice can remain transformable before being fixed too quickly into identity, duty, usefulness or institutional form. It brings together writings exchanged between the zine’s authors, Park Hye-in and Shin Hara, since 2025. Its structure reflects this process of collective writing: main texts, comments and drifts are arranged as different modes of attention. One develops a line of thought, another interrupts or repositions it, and another allows deviation to become part of the method. Across questions of infrastructure, perception, affect, technology, ecology, care, labour, and artistic self-organisation, the book traces how being together is made possible, how it is burdened, and how it might remain open to revision, refusal, return, and change.
Being an Art Collective, Then? is a shared itinerary for thoughts on collective life, being, and practice that both authors have carried separately and will continue to carry forward. It offers a temporary meeting point where distinct streams of thought and practice can touch, diverge, and return, without being forced into a single voice or final conclusion.
