September 2025
The annotated call
We Swear We Saw This. Drawings about Notebooks and Notebooks about the Wor(l)ds explores the variety of methodologies found in artists’ and writers’ notebooks. The theme of the issue adapts titles from both the anthropologist Michael Taussig’s book and artist Adrian Piper’s work.[1] Taussig expands on how drawing as a non-verbal record is ‘naked witnessing’.[2] He highlights the role of chance in fieldwork notebooks and compares this chance to Marcel Proust’s ‘mémoire involontaire’.[3] For Taussig, drawing becomes play and text becomes work.[4] Would the writer Orhan Pamuk agree? Aren’t Pamuk’s notebook pages wanderings and play in words, colours and scribbles?[5] Should we search for the chaotic and ‘nomadic’ confessions in annotated scrapbooks? Can the involuntary connections that happen with juxtapositions of archival images and fictional text bring a temporal disconnect and subvert homogeneous narratives of wars and peace like in Walid Raad’s Atlas series?[6] Or should we consider the notebook as a site of refusal, as Lee Lozano’s pages have been read? Can notebooks reveal genealogies of resistance in theimmediacy of notetaking and the urgency in documenting what is witnessed?[7] The list goes on and you can fill a notebook. As the poet Adrienne Rich states, can we ‘reopen these notebooks with an image befitting the long, erotic, unended wrestling of poetry and politics?’[8]
Autopsy, psychogeography and dérive
Like the practitioners referenced above, this issue brings together new commissions from artists, curators and writers to reflect on the notebook. Is it a witness? Is the notebook a protagonist for fabulation? Is it a site of translation? Is it a mapping device?
When thinking of a notebook, the Eurocentric traditional historian may start first with drawings done during the British Grand Tours or Napoleonic ‘expeditions’ of Roman relics, Greek altars or Egyptian monuments. Think of the circulated prints of Dominique Vivant Denon Voyage dans la Basse et Haute Égypte (1802) and how these drawings framed Egypt as a fetishised landscape, a trope for the orientalist gaze that persists today. Instead, this issue starts with Nubian architect Menna Agha’s ‘autopsy’ of her pedagogic encounter with her students’ drawings of Nubian villages. As a professor and Indigenous to the land, she inhabits a paradoxical position: she becomes the ‘authority’ and ‘the subject’ matter of her student’s drawings. Poetically, we wonder through the possibility of a Nubian counter-archive outside the ‘static’ sketches and ‘frozen’ cracks.
Here in so-called Australia there is another challenge, that is, one of linguistic shifts in the face of estrangement. Art historian Hugh Magnus develops a psychogeographical account of artist Bea Maddock’s (1934-2016) landscape works, cross-examining her diaristic personal notes as a non-Indigenous artist with language annotations in her large-scale paintings to understand her engagement with Indigenous knowledge and living on Indigenous land. Magnus reminds us that a practice with note-taking can morph into a life-long ‘dérive’ even in an estranged space like a settler-colony or an enclosed city.
In contrast to this existential portrayal of the enclosed city, Dandenong this year came to life with HOME 25 – Invisible Cities curated by Miriam La Rosa. There I attendedthe opening which was set by La Rosa as a psychogeographical tour. For this issue, I invited La Rosa to share how her curatorial framework collapses the idea of an exhibition into both a map and a notebook. In her essay, she constructs a thread in the forms of different notes, using theory and practice, how the notebook framework for curation, as method and ethic, opens the possibility for an exhibition to be a site of refusal and resistance. La Rosa’s exhibition themes and writing move us psycho-geographically between the visible vestiges of colonisation and the traces of the violence of displacement under globalisation.
In front of surveillance and censorship
While La Rosa argues that ‘“to take note” is to ultimately refuse mastery’ the artist and activist Georgia Mulholland shares her vulnerable poetic writing, set at an Israeli checkpoint: there the notebook ‘stands where the camera fails — quiet and embodied — holding what words and images could not fully capture.’ This issue has been woven at a time of continued distress as we witness live-streamed genocide in Palestine and accompanying policies here which favour censorship over truth-telling. In this context the art world became polarised: many institutions showed no courage to protect artist programming in fear of losing funding. Yet, many artist-run spaces and publishers used their platforms to support Palestine and her allies. As artists the question of our role became pertinent in this world climate!
Laura Luciana shows how artworld audiences can talk back to institutions. She looks at different forms of online playfulness and solidarity such as the art-anagrams of the artist James Nguyen and the substack commentaries of Zoë Marni Robertson. Indeed, she reminds us that with the case of Khaled Sabsabi’s censorship both from the Venice Biennale and Monash University, where ultimately ‘the public won’ and in both cases his shows were reinstated.
Liminality and translative practices
Artist Joyce Joumaa takes us inside the page folds of the digitised archives of Nahil Bishara at the Palestinian Museum, looking at over two hundred annotated assignments (1942-1955) from her correspondence studies in interior design. Joumaa highlights how these annotations show the ‘liminal existence’ of a Palestinian woman and the ‘encounter… [of] the archaeology of intellectual survival under the boot of mandatory rule’ and that the ‘very act of education becomes a vulnerability.’
Writer Toyah Webb transports us to the same decade, in the US, when H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) was writing her book Tribute to Freud, published in 1956. Webb weaves a translative understanding of fragments in H.D.’s writing and digitised scrapbook, through the notion of the psychoanalytic cut and the poetry form of caesura, ‘blur[ring] the distinction between the product of writerly labour and the labour itself.’
Masquerade and divination cards
In contrast to the above diaristic or psychoanalytic reading of the notebook, Thomas Moran reads artist Lutz Bacher’s books and handwritten notes as tools that exteriorise ideas making an artwork possible, and ‘a mask in a game played with the “stolen goods” of appropriated images.’ Moran intertwines Bernard Stiegler’s notion of technics with theories around masquerade.
Tina Stefanou shares with us fabulated stories based on a series of divination card drawings she made in 2017. Stefanou had shared with me her notebooks when I was writing a text for her solo exhibition ‘You Can’t See Speed’ at ACCA earlier this year. Her many notebooks were filled with surrealist sketches that will eventuate into films and sets. I was struck by her fabulating mind when seeing her divination cards. These were done before she went to art school and held a prophetic possibility perhaps. Her contribution, like her practice, navigate play with language, source creation, political commentary on the value of writing, history making through fabulation and corresponding sounds. We are left to think that perhaps our most difficult political question is: how to save the sheep? Who are the sheep? Us perhaps?
Of Phytoplankton, Passenger Pigeons and Dance
Artist Zara Sully draws attention to the role of the notebook as a gift in the collaborative practice of First Nations’ artist Lisa Roberts. As readers, we find ourselves between phone calls, notes, exhibition walls and gatherings. Through centring a collaborative project at Sawtooth ARI in Launceston, Tasmania, Sully highlights a practice that operates like phytoplankton’s generative unconditional gift to the atmosphere and breathing.
While Roberts turns her notebook into a gift to her friend, Sully, under the condition of contributing to the drawings, Zoë Sadokierski recounts how her son drew over her sketches of Martha, the last passenger pigeon which became extinct in 1914. Sadokierski explains poetically how her practice of redrawing Martha obsessively, and with her son, was oriented ‘to breathe life back into a lost species.’
Mya Cole notes in her essay that ‘drawing fixes disappearances into marks’ as she examines the notebooks of the New Zealand dancer Douglas Wright. Her essay explores how the fluid transformation of form in the drawn lines of the moving body and landscape attest to a pre-linguistic affect, making the drawn image and the ephemeral performance inseparable.
Hand performance, snapping fingers and liberation
On the pages of notebooks, do hands and fingers need to perform? Can the hand and the mind synchronise together? Like a dance? Is the curvy line in a letter, a different performance from an underlining move? Is legible and beautiful handwriting a sign of a disciplined hand or rather one in tune with its mind?
Artist Marcus McKenzie exposes himself through a touching account of his lived experience in developing as a child the need for a delicate handwriting practice. McKenzie confronts us with marks from a coded world, where the notebook is filled with secrets and neologisms, words in the making of worlds and worlds that demand new words like perforganisation. In these neologisms and slower pace of the hand, he finds liberation from the brutal memories of school disciplinary moments.
Designer Sunny Lei compares underlining to ‘snapping fingers’. Lei’s text navigates through different underlining signifiers in Danielle Aubert’s Marking the Dispossessed (2015), Honoré de Balzac’s annotations of his Eugénie Grandet (1833) manuscript, Marcel Cohen’s Autoportrait en lecteur (2017). She ends her text with a collage poem made of ‘her own collection of underlines,’ notes from other writers’ texts.
Activist and writer Carlos Eduardo Morreo brings to this issue his liberation theology lens: his notebooks parallel forms of liturgy, confessions and prophecy. His accounts turn these notebooks into cartographies of mobilisation, notes for resistance in support of Palestine.
In poetic prose and artist pages, artist Marcela Alejandra Gómez Escudero escorts us through her libre-tas. We encounter Begonias, the veil of the Virgen de Guadelupe, contradictory grief, translations, and … the cover page of her mother’s thesis on teaching shorthand writing. Through these juxtapositions Escudero’s pages expose patriarchy softly and foreground matriarchal liberation.
The notebooks you will encounter here are an assemblage of… wandering lines: some resilient insertions, some playful, some occulted, some caring and reparative. I invite you around each scribble and note, to look for an imagined wor(l)d.
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[1]Michael Taussig, I Swear I Saw This, Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2011.
[2]Ibid., p.74.
[3]Ibid., p.57
[4]Ibid., p.73.
[5]Orhan Pamuk, Memoirs of Distant Mountains, Ekin Oklap (trans.), Hamish Hamilton, London, 2024.
[6]Alan Gilbert, ‘Walid Raad’s Spectral Archive, Part I: Historiography as Process’, e-flux, January 2016, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/69/60594/walid-raad-s-spectral-archive-part-i-historiography-as-process/ (accessed 30 September 2025).
[7]See how Rachel Douglas uses anthropologist-artist Gina Athena Ulysse’s notion of Rassemblaj to show how Haitian texts and films on earthquake archives (notebooks) are ‘reworking of [Aimé] Césaire’s ur-Notebook.’ Rachel Douglas, ‘Archiving Ten Years of Aftershocks in Haitian Seismic Notebooks.’ Journal of West Indian Literature, vol. 29, no. 1 (2021): 36–52.[8]Adrienne Rich, ‘Jacob and the Angel’, in What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics, W&W Norton and Company, New York, 2003.