This publication is the result of the dialogue the participating artists had with the Frans Masereel Centre, client of the project ‘Characters make stories’. The first discussions were about the individual works, produced by each artist during his or her residency. It was more a story about their working process. This rather individual translation of the graphic medium in their personal work didn’t offer a sufficient context for a group exhibition. A more general question had to be asked, namely: What is the position and role of graphics in the visual culture of today? And which story could be told by the project regarding this? Eventually, the answers to these questions turned out to be various reflections about collectivity, representation and ownership. Other topics popped up in the discussions, topics like responsibility, casting, hierarchy, the public and the legibility of an exhibition. In the end the publication became rather a bundling of reflections and footnotes about the project. It turned out to be a manual for the exhibition in the first place, although it could also serve as a handbook for another project in the future, or like it is stated in the introduction:
‘A preface for a project is in fact a preface (prologue) and a post face (epilogue) at the same time. It is the preface to the exhibition, which you are visiting at this moment, or which you maybe remember afterwards. The use of the English term preface seems more suitable. PRE_FACE. It is not a catalogue of the exhibition. It is a preface that was written after the facts, in order to investigate what exactly the project entailed. What is it about? And how can we present or expose it to the outside world? A preface is usually only written at the end of the writing process. The writer distances himself from the book, steps into the limelight, for the first time, or leaves this more distant approach to someone else. He himself remained on the threshold without really entering the house, with both feet planted firmly in reality but with his head still in the clouds of fiction. In this way a preface more resembles a report or commentary upon an event. This A preface for a project is at the same time a post face because, on the one hand, it refers to an admission or to several admissions, which were still part of it as elements of a possible or hidden structure. One says, for example, that a silence can be pregnant, or that the white spaces between the words and lines of text are filled with latent meaning(s) or image(s). In this way we attempt to pass on the underlying story as a surplus, or at least to reveal some fragments of it, so that it can engender a motor for other reproductions. As you will notice, not everything that you see and read here is ours.’ - Frans Masereel Center
