Fillip was an ambitious idea that started with various individuals who felt a need for an independent and critical art publication in Vancouver. The five year run magazine has taken many different routes and turns. We talk to Amy Zion, the Assistant Editor of Fillip, to discuss the publications past, present and prosperous future.
Photo courtesy of Fillip
Fillip was founded in 2005 and grew out of a series of meetings held in the previous year by a group of artists, curators, historians, and gallery directors discussing the need for an independent and critical arts publication based in Vancouver. I don’t know the full list of names of who was present at those meetings, since obviously I wasn’t part of that group, but Jordan Strom was the lead instigator. One of the first meetings was held at the West End apartment of Caterina Fake(founder of Flickr). Those early meetings were quite large and unwieldy but eventually helped produce a core group of Jonathan Middleton, Sadira Rodrigues, Jeff Khonsary, and Jordan. Our mandate today is to provide a forum for critical discussion within and between communities engaged in cultural production and criticism in Vancouver and beyond. I’m currently the Assistant Editor of Fillip, and I joined the staff in 2007, right after Issue 6.
Who came up with the name? Is there a story behind it?
After months of meetings, the initial large group grew increasingly frustrated around choosing a name for the project. Many people left because of it, actually! Eventually an ultimatum was given, and the word “Fillip” was chosen. It is a sort of under used noun describing a stimulus or boost. It’s also the flicking action created between the thumb and the forefinger. The name was also a sort of tongue-in-cheek response to the proliferation of magazines being named after women—Charlie, Lola, Patti, for example.
The name has produced all manner of confusion about spelling, pronunciation, and meaning, which has been a good and bad thing. For us, a “fillip” is meant to stimulate practices and discourses today through the publication of long form exhibition reviews,essays, book reviews, interviews, events, and artist projects.
Photos: Jennilee Marigomen
Who is your target audience?
I meet a whole range of people who read Fillip, from students in undergraduate and graduate programs, to established artists from the 1960s and 70s who are still active in the local community. If you want the demographics, I’d say our audience ranges in age from about 18 to 80, including writers, curators, art critics, artists, students, professors,graphic designers, and other art professionals. At the moment, most of our readership is concentrated in North America and Europe—but we are always working to expand this.We recently were picked up by MediaBus (link), a wonderful South Korean distributor.
There is quite a range of different people that run Fillip. Who are they and what are the positions each individual occupies to keep the ball rolling?
I’m really lucky to work with such a small and dedicated staff that determine Fillip’s editorial vision and manage production. We are: Jeff Khonsary (Publisher), Kristina Lee Podesva (Editor),Kate Steinmann (Associate Editor), Antonia Hirsch (Associate Editor), Amy Zion (AssistantEditor), Michael Cadamia (Office Manager), Jordan Strom (Founding Editor) as well as a number of interns who assist in the publication’s development and events. All the design is done by The Future (link), a Vancouver design studio co-founded by Jeff. Fillip is published by the Projectile.
Antonia Hirsch is currently organizing talks that will relate to her upcoming series in Fillip, which you will hear more about in Issue 13.
Publishing Society, a non-profit society registered in BC, that has an active board, which includes Jonathan Middleton, Jordan Strom, Melanie O’Brian, Christoph Keller, Jeff Derksen, Derek Barnett, and Cheyenne Turions.
Photos: Courtesy of Fillip
Can you tell us about the Motto Store? There is a store in Zurich and Berlin? What was the deciding factor to have Motto in Vancouver? What is the store mainly dedicated to?
Motto is an amazing sort of “grass-roots” art book distributor and store that started in Zurich, and is now also in Berlin. Alexis Zavialoff, who started Motto, is Fillip’s European distributor, and has been a champion of the magazine for quite some time now.
In the summer of 2009, Fillip had a launch of Issue 9 at Motto Berlin, and continued to develop a close professional relationship with Alexis and Motto.
Jeff collaborated with Director/Curator Melanie O’Brian to bring Alexis to Vancouver where he installed a temporary Motto Storefront at Artspeak gallery for six weeks in the summer of 2010. Alexis has installed temporary Motto stores all over the world—in Korea, Athens, Vilnius, Frankfurt, etc. There was just a Motto installation at Witte de Within Rotterdam where Jeff and Antonia presented Fillip at a mini-symposium on critical publishing practices.
In its Vancouver iteration, the Motto Storefront was a bookstore as well as a temporary residency and event space. Each week, we hosted a variety of both local and international professionals in the field of art publishing, distribution, and design.
If you like art publishing, Motto has an amazing blog and we’re all completely addicted to it! We are currently working on bringing the store to Vancouver more permanently — so stay tuned.
Photo: Jennilee Marigomen
There are quite a lot of events and lectures that happen at Fillip. Who is the curator putting these events together? Any new exciting events happening in the fall?
It depends on the type of event… for a period, I was given the extra title of Events Administrator and organized our smaller-scale discussions and talks with people like Markus Miessen (in association with Artspeak), Felicity Taylor, David Horvitz (in association with the Or Gallery), and Ryan Trecartin (in association with Emily Carr and VIVO).
But we also plan larger projects: in 2010 we produced the Motto Storefront and in 2009 we organized the Judgment and Contemporary Art Criticism (link) conference. Both projects were organized by Jeff in collaboration with Melanie, who is the director/curator of Artspeak. Jeff also curated an installation by Dutch artist Mark Manders for the Bright Light (link) festival in February. In 2012, Kristina Lee Podesva in consultation with Lorna Brown, is organizing the 2012 Artist Run Centers and Collectives Conference with the theme of Institutions by Artists.
Antonia Hirsch is currently organizing talks that will relate to her upcoming series in Fillip, which you will hear more about in Issue 13.
This Fall, our intern Alex Turgeon organized an issue launch at Every Letter in the Alphabet for Fillip 12. Jeff has been traveling overseas to attend the Motto Book Fairand give a presentation at Kunst Werke in Berlin, as well as at the Witte de With in
Rotterdam. In October, Jeff and Kristina will be participating in a residency at the KadistArt Foundation in San Francisco on behalf of Fillip. In November, we will have a special project space in collaboration with AAAARG.ORG at the New York Art Book Fair and
hopefully will host two writers and art publishers from Sweden in Vancouver at the end of the month. Fall 2010 is a jet-setting season for Fillip. We will have more local events scheduled in the spring.
But to answer your question, we aim to work as a collective. Each of us initiates projects related to the content of the magazine and our own interests within it, and all events are facilitated and realized with the support of all our staff in some capacity.
I saw the first text released online for Fillip 12. Why did you decide to publish this issue in phases on the web before releasing the printed issue?
I’m really excited about this format, and Fillip 12 particularly. It is a special issue produced with additional support from the City of Vancouver as part of the Bright Light project, which was a loose consortium of projects elaborated by a number of cultural organizations sited in one particularly active neighborhood. Normally, Fillip does not commission texts around a particular theme, but on the occasion of the Olympics we thought it was important to initiate a discussion around the relationship between art and its public. In order to enact a sort of “critical form of publicness”—to steal Sven Lutticken’s phrase—we decided to release these texts in full online, one per week, until the official release of the printed magazine.
The articles are sent to directly to our mailing list’s inboxes each week and so far no one has complained about “spam.” In fact, the contents has traveled much more rapidly in the digital realm and we’ve received a lot more attention and positive feedback for this issue already. I think we’ll be utilizing the web a little more in the future, but we still remain loyal to the printed Fillip.
Photos: Courtesy of Fillip
Is Vancouver receptive to your magazine? Is the funding a relevant factor to your success?
In a word, yes! We are very proud of and are thankful for the fact that we have committed and supportive readers in Vancouver who attend our events and occasionally blog about our content (like you guys!). Also, we’re lucky to have had dedicated interns over the years and continue to be approached by students and recent graduates who volunteer in different capacities. They are an invaluable asset to our organization. Local writers also support Fillip by contributing articles and by referring other authors to us who are located outside of Vancouver.
In regard to local funding, Fillip receives a substantial amount from the BC Arts Council and the City of Vancouver. We are grateful that they have continuously supported the magazine and our various projects.
Are there any new artists that are on your radar right now? What is it about their body of work that you admire?
Well, we have always tried not to promote the work of individual artists, but rather contextualize artistic practices in relation to various contemporary discourses. In fact, this “non-glossy” approach to art practices is what attracted me to the project in the first
place.
For example, as we mentioned, Fillip worked with Mark Manders to realize a project titled Window with Fake Newspapers at the old Only SeaFoods restaurant on Hastings and Carrall St. Manders produced Traducing Ruddle, an installment in his ongoing series of fake newspapers, which was distributed in unmarked newspaper boxes around the Downtown Eastside neighborhood for the duration of the Olympic Winter Games. As the artist project for Fillip 12, Manders’ publication and installation provides an entry point for an in depth investigation into the complex relationship between art and public space explored in our current issue of Fillip magazine.
Photo:Jennilee Marigomen
Do you have any new projects on the go?
It feels like we always have a million things on the go—books, projects, events, traveling… if you’re interested in keeping track of us we have a very active Twitter account and Facebook page—but I’ll summarize our some our current projects.
We just released our second book, our first of the Folio Series, which came out of the Judgment and Contemporary Art Criticism conference. It includes texts by conference participants Tirdad Zolghadar, Maria Fusco, Dietrich Dietrichsen, and several others. Antonia Hirsch’s artist book, Komma, with texts by Maria Muhle and Kristina Lee Podesva, will be released later this Fall as well. We have several other book titles on the go and are producing the first of a series of risograph printed pamphlet editions beginning with a one by Jeff Derksen and another by Donato Mancini.
Photo: Jennilee Marigomen
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