The Essayer

In October 2020, the pedagogy-oriented gallery-bookshop-workshop Ravisius Textor is ready to welcome the Serving Library Collection in his walls. A collection of originals related to the « image in the age of mechanical reproduction » published in the periodic Dot Dot Dot and its sequel in the digital age The Bulletins of The Serving Library. An eclectic collection gathered over the course of time almost by chance and not without some casualness, but with the requirements of a projet capable of federating the research of graphic or type designers, academics, authors, international critics among the most refreshing and innovative of our time.
The installation of the collection must come with a pedagogical activation, with the meeting between the periodical's most recent editors, Stuart et Francesca Bertolotti-Bailey, Vincenzo Latronico, and the graphic design's bachelor students of Ensba Lyon, accompanied by Alexandru Balgiu. But what we now call Covid 19's first wave swept across Europe in September with all the consequences we know. Borders closures, confinements, curfews. In November this installation is postponed to an unknown date. From then on, everything is tried so this seminar is held via the networks. Regular videoconferences are set up by Alex Balgiu between Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey and the students from Lyon. The progress of the student's work is regularly relayed on Ravisius Textor's Instagram account.
This book is in a way the sum, the relay and the memory of the students' reading work of the Bulletins of the Serving Library, made in this curious pedagogical place which is experimented then: the screen, the phone, the videoconferences and the social networks. A distance and an intensity, a freedom, a solidarity, an urgency, all particular.