EDITORIAL

Dear Francisco,

An editorial as an email exchange seems fitting between us. We essentially met on Instagram— I think you’re actually the only person I’ve ever met online— when I reached out to ask to work with you on some drawings and a podcast, and you responded asking if I would rather consider being an editor with Cartha. 

Now wrapping up Cartha’s tenth year and final issue with a pen pal format makes more sense than I think we initially considered. Reaching out to those who have influenced the magazine, or those who could influence what it will become, I spoke with Holly Baker, our fellow editor since 2021, and Meg Miller, editor and writer and editorial director at Are.na. These exchanges fundamentally were fun to do, and remind me of the obvious fact that thinking is best done in collaboration with others, but also grounded my labour in writing and publishing as something that reaches people. Writing is conversing, and it’s too often treated as an object, much like architecture. 

In my emails with Meg, I was rereading On Relations, the first publication by Cartha, where in the foreword Rebecca Kieseweitter reflects on Cartha’s foundations of empathy and friendship in the publishing sphere— what comes across as maybe naive, I considered rather a form of resistance in the landscape of architectural writing in 2015. Today, Cartha remains a social project, comparatively informal, offline, and free. The shape of critique changed, the cost of labour and time has drastically increased, and it’s time we shift our focus. Where to from here?

I almost expected a magical solution to come from my conversations with Holly and Meg: what can Cartha become without website maintenance, without annual publishing, no posting no emails no planning? Where does ten years of production go? 

It likely doesn’t come as a surprise that we in fact did not unlock the secret code to remaining relevant without effort. Both conversations brought up references that build on publishing work as a compassionate and social endeavour. Cartha remains through its insistence to exist in the first place—pushing back against elitism in architectural writing, held together over the years by a sincere passion for collaboration, for the sake of a reciprocal, non-transactional exchange of ideas. Though I think that foundation is still a valid critique, the context is different. With my pen pals, I’ve discovered so many new essays and publications that excite me, that challenge the current political, environmental, economic, cultural conditions through writing in ways we no longer can afford to do. I’m glad to have more time to read them!

We’re searching for a way to perpetuate, when, that’s been underway for 10 years. Writing as a form of conversation leads me to believe, in Meg’s words, that the essays and ideas have been “distributed, passed around, lent to friends; they’re wedged between other, similar, books on bookshelves, read years later… they live as PDFs on drives or websites on servers, are passed as links and attachments. But I think they definitely also live on in the minds and memories and collective knowledge of the people who made them and the people who read them, a legacy that’s not so tangible but is probably most of the reason we decide to do this work in the first place.” In our continued desire to communicate, I think this is a just and dignified ending for this particular magazine, a fertile ground for unlimited and unpredictable regrowth.

best wishes from Winnipeg,
Ainsley

…

Dear Ainsley,

I agree and I thank you.

I could leave it at that for I happily agree with what you state and earnestly agree with what you question.

The way I see it, there were two moments in Cartha’s editorial process: before you joined and after. The first years were ripe with discussions that resulted from a need to state a position in an unknown context, a need to conquer a space for setting a frame. A bit too much energy spent on format and a bit too less on content. When you joined, a more constructive, more interesting sort of questions became the sole focus of the editorial work; we freed ourselves from identitary worries and started to really enjoy asking the questions we felt should be asked. I very much prefer the second moment. And I thank you for that.

My exchanges with Bruther, Pablo Garrido, Giovanna Borasi, and Jeffrey Huang and Guillaume Yersin have been less of an introspective exercise and more of a naive probing into fields of knowledge I remain curious about: respectively, the architectural project as cultural event, the act of publishing as knowledge building, the relation between curating and catering, and the future of learning architecture. 

As you said, the exchanges were (at least for me) fun to do. But why?

A couple of things: First, in his Mind in Society, Lev Vygotsky emphasizes social interaction, role play, and imaginative play as foundational for cognitive and social development. His analysis is based on child behaviour but recent literature and the development of the understanding of playfulness in adults (check the work by René Proyer) allow me to say that we grown-ups can extract some good old fun from social exchange. Second, these exchanges were challenging, as good conversations should be. At the same time, the email medium allows for the claiming of a certain comfort in the conversation. These two factors combined created a sort of flow state that I found simply very good. 

As I looked back at the contributions published through Cartha as useful anchors in my discussions in the pen-pal issue, a certain fun pattern emerged. Editing a text, reaching out to a photographer, composing a call, producing an exhibition, imagining a book, designing a website, writing an editorial. The interactions with all these challenging and encouraging people made the time working on Cartha feel like fun.

Thanks to your insights on what remains of Cartha, I no longer worry about an idea of a legacy or of conceptual value in what has been produced. Now, and for the future, I want to focus on what Cartha allowed me: a tremendous amount of fun that I would have never had the chance to experience otherwise.

I hope you agree and, once again, I thank the wonderful group of people who have been at the core of this initiative:

Matilde Girão
Gonçalo Frias
Aurélien Caetano
Elena Chiavi
Pablo Garrido
Esther Lohri
Francisco Ramos Ordóñez
Rubén Valdez
Angelika Hinterbrandner
Brittany Utting
Holly Baker
Amy Perkins
Max Frischknecht
Philipp Möckli
Thomas Kramer

And you, Ainsley Johnston.

All the best from Santarém,
Francisco