Libraries of Stone and Wood

This Quarterly Essay presents the work of A Published Event (Justy Phillips and Margaret Woodward) who make long-term relational artworks through shared acts of public telling. Exploring chance encounter, constructed situations and the shared authorship of lived experience, we work with artists and writers, materials and ideas, to create fictiōnal writing, prose, book-works, video, installation and performance. Our use here of the prefix fictiō meaning “to make with”, differs from contemporary understandings of fiction, as “to make up”. Embracing fictiō, the Latin root of fiction, enables us to make-with and from lived experience, a process we call fictiōneering. Our hybrid works—a kind of fusing-distilling-slagging-attuning to the local—explore the metaphysical language and speculative publishing of lived experience. A Published Event is an offering to participate. A cut that releases and absorbs. Leaks and floods. In relations of body, duration and event. Propelled by a desire to connect with the more-than-human elements of everyday life, we seek a kind of solidarity built on affective attunement. Through our libraries of stone and wood we move speculatively but with conviction, implicated in every act of making-public, always with each other.