KKH Royal Institute of Art Stockholm x einaidea, MANUAL Publication Series, 2024

A shared mental image—that of a collection of hand-books hanging, alongside other hand-tools, from the hooks of a wall at an art school workshop—triggered this process. Such inusual manuals would be a form of grey literature prescribing critical uses not of a specific machine or tool, but of the workshop itself as a space open to mutations, reconfigurations, and alterations of its expected functional order. A permanently altered space awaking to itself. We took inspiration from the serendipitous find of several publications made by the Socialist Patients’ Collective («Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv»), also known as the SPK—a revolutionary group based at and operating from the psychiatric hospital of the University of Heidelberg between February 1970 and July 1971. Besides the formal appreciation of the SPK’s reports and manifestos, the very nature of their initiative resonated with the idea of altering the dynamics of a confined space, whose political potential could only be intensified by the situation and resistance of its inmates and whose goal, akin to many radical forms of art and philosophy, was to turn the human into a multi-species, «multi-focal» collective in a state of constant change/generation. This book series’ design stands, therefore, as a humble homage to their emancipatory efforts. Team: Manuel Cirauqui, director; Ana Habash and Alex Viladrich, designers. 

          [Book dimensions: 105x176mm]