'ISSUES 2025: Exquisite Corpse' Digital, Print & Broadcast Publications Launching Sunday 8th February, 2026
ISSUES is the annual, peer-led publication that serves as the milestone public offering for each School of Commons* (SoC) program cycle. It collates and contextualises the processes, practices, and methodologies of each participating project within SoC. Each project is invited to contribute to ISSUES in a form and style that is both reflective of, and complementary to, their own ways and workings. As such, experimentation and the re-working of traditional publishing modes are always encouraged.
Moreover, for each edition of ISSUES, the SoC Cohort collaboratively develops a collective framing that brings together the thematic threads and working methods they have both individually and collectively explored and developed during their 10-month peer-learning journey.
Each Edition of ISSUES is also typically coupled with a Collective Editorial developed by the SoC team in collaboration with the Cohort which adds further layers of contextualisation to the programme and outputs of each SoC offering.
However, for the 2025 edition of ISSUES, the SoC Cohort brought their theme of ‘Exquisite Commons’ to life by taking the foundations of the ISSUES structure and bringing it into an entirely new process of self-organisation. This evolution of a previously linear practice has produced new connective pathways between the collective theme and individual project contributions, as well as for the publication itself. Which, for the very first time, will now live as a digital, broadcast, and print format.
Traces of this Exquisition Commons approach can be found throughout the publication, most obviously in the scrapping of the aforementioned Collective Editorial for the Metafesto: Making a Vessel in the Sky, and the intertexual bridge prompts that you will notice accompany the texts, that draw a poetic line not only between each individual contribution and the collective theme, but to its entangled clan of fellow contributions, too.
A huge and heartfelt appreciation goes to the entire School of Commons 2025 cohort for the dedication they have placed into the contributions of this publication, and to the SoC Issues Steering Committee: Belén, Chantelle, Klara, Lou, and Layla, without whom this physical publication, and its broadcast companion, would not exist.