Gather

he story of this issue begins with the provisional confluence of and a committee of the Alberta Association of Artist-run Centres (AAARC) who have spent more than two years planning a gathering called Lands to Travel Through (LTTT) in partnership with the Artist-Run Centres and Collectives Conference (ARCA). Following an early April editorial advisory meeting, it became clear on ’s end that the shifts brought on by the pandemic and the groundswell of Black Lives Matter activism would come to have inextricable influence on the formation of the Autumn issue: specifically, the paradox of so urgently, vitally, needing to convene, during a time with unparalleled restrictions on gathering. Scheduled for August 2020 in Mohkinstsis/Calgary, LTTT was to address many facets of artist-centred organizing, including a focus on resources: limited resources, sharing resources, resources in the context of capitalism’s perennially churning demand of growth and accumulation, and integrally: how can such logics be resisted through artist-centred models? When the physical gathering had to be postponed as a result of the pandemic, AAARC sought to pursue a project that would honour and extend from plans already made, while also considering the gathering’s concerns in concert with ’s editorial team’s own, replete with distinct yet overlapping conditions, contexts, and contributors. After many conversations among us, and an agreement to share resources (itself a form of radical collaboration that is rather unprecedented at , and an enactment of some of the central aims of LTTT), the “Gather” theme was established, and we began to think anew of what the word means at its very core: not only for us humans, but all of “us”—stones, gravestones, Prairie grass, comets, seeds, travelling envelopes, berries, buried jugs of water, frozen pixels, iridescent sheets of acetate, bees—who comprise the many concentric circles of our shared world.