In 2020/21, Emily Turner and I took over the organization of the Werkplaats Typografie library and, with it, the continuation of the “Curating the Library” project for the coming months. We quickly decided to focus our programme around sharing. We invited the participants of Werkplaats Typografie to open up their research and engage in conversation with one another about what they were currently working on—unfinished projects that were, so to speak, still in their larval stage. We took our inspiration from the concept of “Larval Subjects” from Gilles Deleuze’s “Abécédaire”.

To kick off our project, we put together a leaflet that presented our ideas and provided general information about the library. For this, we designed a larvae-esque typeface: “Authentic Larvae.” We assigned each participant a letter of the alphabet and asked them to come up with a term related to their research.

Our collaborative “Abécédaire” for the 2020/21 academic year read as follows:

A is for Afterimage (Emily Turner)
B is for Breath (Leon Lukas Plum)
C is for Cyber- (Callum Dean)
D is for DIY (Raoul Audouin)
E is for Emmentaler (Nina Schouten)
F is for Four (Wooseok Jang)
G is for Gravity (Marcus Wachter)
H is for House (Mijia Wang)
I is for II (Jan-Pieter Karper)
J is for Japanese (Kaixin Chen)
K is for KINesthetics (Yunie Chae)
L is for Looking (Eglė Petraškaitė)
M is for Mirage (Johanna Himmelsbach)
N is for NON (Tanat Teeradakorn)
O is for ghOstDVD (Theetat Thunkijjanukij)
P is for Pattern (Mariavittoria Campodonico)
Q is for Que*Quoi*Qua* (Vennica Sidibanga Kaseye)
R is for Recreate (Alex Tanazefti)
S is for Stay tuned/(s): sometime(s) plural(s) stretch(es) (Amira Prescott)
T is for Tied (Marianne Noordzij)
U is for You (Yara Veloso)
V is for Via (Yan Zhihan)
W is for World (So-Yeon Kim)
X is for 4,6,7 (Qihang Li)
Y is for YOUTH (Emma Hazen)
Z is for Zen (Lydienne Albertoe)
& is for & is for & is for (Kai Udema)
* is for Acoustics (Tjobo Kho)

We chose a format that has become particularly ubiquitous during the pandemic: an email chain. At prearranged times, the participants sent short texts about their research projects to the group, supplemented by additional text and images. Each email was a reply to the one before it.