Buitenshuis was a two-year project that grew out of a set of existing local cultural initiatives in Ghent and the need, shared across those initiatives, to get to know each other better. The working question was practical and political at once: how can the right to culture be realised for everyone, and how can the cultural programme of a city be made more accessible, more democratic and more evenly distributed. Over the two years, the network approached this question through thinking days, open conversations, a support line, and a series of zines released as philosophical workbooks.
Studio Studio designed the second zine in the series. Ten authors responded to the central question in forms that remained deliberately open: poetry, imagery, opinion pieces, laments, footnotes. Rather than holding those voices inside a single typographic framework, the design treats each text as a composition in its own right, with its own typographic translation keyed to the form and register of the writing. A lament sets itself differently than a footnote. A poem reads differently than an opinion piece. Across the zine, typography moves with the content rather than imposing order on it, producing a publication that reads as a collection of distinct voices rather than as a uniform anthology.
The zine is distributed free of charge, on request, by post, and is available in full as an audio version on SoundCloud and Spotify.
